Layout, art & design

[Steve Klc]

Jeanne--your Food section is beautiful--colorful, consistently artistic and aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps the most beautiful newspaper Food section in the country. I especially enjoy your frequent use of photographer Renee Comet.

Perhaps you'd be willing to share how this comes together each week--and reveal some of the process behind the product we see and read? How directly involved are you, as section editor, in the design and layout?  How large is your team behind the scenes, apart from the writing talent, to help you put the section together? Are there Food section-specific people who handle this or are there general Post photo, art and graphic editors which you work with?

[Jeanne McManus]

I'm fortunate to have Kathy Legg as my art director. She has great ideas, and is a great reader too, which is not always the case with art directors.

In addition, we have a long and happy relationship with both Renee Comet, photographer, and Lisa Cherkasky, food stylist. They inevitably take an idea we give them and crank it up about five notches. And what comes back from them is so much better than what we had expected.

(The same is always true for graphic artist Steve McCracken, who frequently does work for us.)

Renee and Lisa handle almost all of our studio work: it's an art form that newspaper photographers don't necessarily get experienced in. But Kathy Legg also has an unerring sense of the various talents of Post staff photographers, and, working with our picture desk, always finds that right match for our assignments.

So many of the photographers work hard for the daily newspaper, and the result of a day's work can be a photo that's 2 columns wide and three inches deep and buried on A13. So when they work for us, it's a great opportunity to get more display, and, inevitably color.

We also have a studio in the building and staffer Julia Ewan has been extremely helpful photographing our market watches (vegetables and fruit) and the art that you see on page 3.

I have ideas for art, and Kathy and I exchange ideas, but generally I just give my suggestions and stand back and get out of the way.

I like to plan, too. And planning helps art. Last minute art always looks it.