Kristin Lenz is art director of Inc. magazine and is judging long-form entries for the 35th Best of News Design™ competition. To get to know her better, we posed three questions:
What advice to you have for anyone entering this contest in the future?
Edit yourself much more harshly. A lot of things that we haven’t awarded in the long-form category have been because of one single page that stood out as a sore thumb. Tight, tight editing.
What inspires you?
I do a lot of other design type things. I enjoy photography, I dip my toes in screen printing and letterpress and those old-school forms of communication, and I recently took up running long distance, so that’s been an interesting new source of inspiration.
What trends have you spotted?
In the long-form category today we judged special sections and there was not a lot special. The cover would be good, and you turn the page and you see just another day’s newspaper. I held a high bar for what is “special,” and there wasn’t as much special as I thought there would be. Also, there’s been a lot of reprinting of really old front pages, which I think as newspaper people we have a nostalgia for, but I found a lot of their use unnecessary.
Society for News Design
Society for News Design