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Sure. That old every-page-must-have-a-dominant-photo
rule resulted from years of chaotic
pages swimming in smallish photos. Nobody likes messy page
designs -- especially photographers, who love to see their best photos
anchoring big stories. (In fact, too often the downside of
letting photographers design pages is that, as the photos get
bigger, the story count dwindles, and the pace of the pages
slows to a crawl.)
BUT if you’re careful and smart, you
can avoid chaos and still design successful pages without big
photos. You can group small photos into a central cluster. You
can anchor the page with an infographics package (see example,
below left). You can run big headlines as dominant art (as in
the terrific page below right -- notice, by the way, how small
all its images actually are).
Whatever you decide, that basic principle
remains: Without something to anchor it, a busy page quickly becomes
chaotic.
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