Most of the time, the changes that occur during the
editing and design process are supposed to be confidential. But in the interest
of providing you and your students with a teaching tool, National Geographic
has generously granted me permission to share some examples from Deadliest Animals.
at the changes the design went through is a great way to teach visual literacy.
Here are the first (above) and final (below) versions of the first spread (click to enlarge).
In the first layout, the background on every spread was a
warm light yellow. In the final layout, the background colors change from spread to spread and are
much more vibrant. The designers decided to remove the lions incorporated into the
page numbers, probably because they’re a bit distracting. They also changed the
photo on the right. The new image shows lionesses hunting, which is more in
line with the topic of the book.
different. During layout, NG decided to delete this spread from the book
because it wasn’t possible to get an exciting photo of a cone snail.
To fill the empty space, they moved the “But are lions
deadliest of all?” to the next spread with a very dramatic image. They also
moved up the answer to that question, which was originally on the third spread.
the final layout (below) is much stronger. You’ll also notice that this is where we
decided to change the book-specific heading for the glossary terms from “Word
Bite” to “Deadly Definition”.
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