Design
Newspaper design
News and Feature
Considering how to balance text and graphics.
Representing cohesive design features.
Click on any photo to expand
This issue had a theme of political engagement but I wanted to further that within certain theme elements. With the "ripped" elements, I wanted to demonstrate that we were showing politics in Ann Arbor in a new light. This theme also had to be consistent with the graphic on the front page which was made by Maya Kogulan. (click the bottom right button to see). I purposefully avoided the typical blue and red representation of political spreads because it reinforces the idea that politics is more than party-based culture. Note: This design won first place from the Michigan Interscholastic Press association for news design.
This story was incredibly long which is why it became a "one-pager" but with simple design, the graphics don't overpower the story. I also considered another way to break up the story: section headers. Through all of these measures I feel as though I am able to make the piece visually appealing and bring the readers in. To the right you can find an info-graphic I also designed about the teacher contract.
Opinion
"Simple" designs with multiple entry points as well as a variety of content and graphics.
Designs with flare
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Every issue we have a section titled "Student voices" where Huron students have the opportunity to submit an article as a guest. When considering a political-based design, I need to make sure that my personal biases aren't playing a role in the photo choice. In a different Student Voices page, there was a photo of Donald Trump frowning. I chose a picture similar to this for Bernie in order to stay consistent and not perpetuate certain biases. While we are at the mercy of creative commons photos, we try our best to be unbiased.
When we use inverted text, we consider the reasoning behind it very carefully. With the story content it was important to make a bolder statement and catch the eye of a viewer. However, keeping a simplistic design and balanced design is still incredibly important. This is why the top story package is kept with a white background. Additionally, I used lighter colors for majority of the dominant graphic to balance the black and white graphic.
With the 2020 Presidential election, I thought it was important to educate people on each candidate's policies. I made sure to use photos that mirrored each other to avoid bias. I tried to find very similar photos but decided that with both candidates' hands in the cutouts, they somewhat mirror each other. I really like how this page turned out because the information is important and the cutouts stand out to the reader. While dominance is incredibly important, I intentionally did not include a dominant to keep the aesthetic of the page.
As the pages only encompass one story package, I feel as though it's okay to use different fonts but with consistency. I was not given images from all of my sources so I needed to find another way to represent each state. I drew the states and the United States outline using the Indesign pen tool. I think this design is a really great way to bring a cohesive package with four different stories. I had to consider the use of color as some colors wouldn't be easy to read with black text.
Yearbook design
This spread is the first one I designed for the yearbook. I broke the eye line slightly but still followed design rules and incorporated our theme as much as possible. With the Spotify codes, I emailed the Student Press Law Center to check that I could use them. All of our spreads represent our theme but this one especially brings in all of our elements cohesively (probably because I spent 10+ hours on this alone) Note: This spread won fifth place for yearbook spread design at NSPA's clips and clicks competition.
We made fake homecoming the dominant because homecoming is typically a big deal. I included content on the right page that wasn't related to Foco in order to still keep the idea of Chrono and get more students into the book. We typically use one or two colors for our main colors but still incorporate the other colors.
Sports!
The OLD fall sports pages. After we finished fall sports, I decided to scrap the designs and create pages that were just "fall sports" rather than sport specific pages. This is because we found we did not have enough content for all of the sports as we are online. My inspiration for this redesign came from seeing a similar concept by Grand Blanc high school's yearbook. We initially decided to use this method for the winter sports but I felt that we need to keep our styles cohesive. I took the content from all of the sports pages and transformed.
The NEW fall sports pages. Some of the original designs took hours of work and looked great but our yearbook needs to be cohesive. I initially thought this organization was a little crazy just because we had never done it before but this year is definitely the year to try new things. I appreciate how flexible my editorial board and adviser are as this isn't the first time I've switched gears on our yearbook. I am willing to make these changes and take on the extra work because the spreads matter so much to me. (These are still being finalized so not all content is done.)
Sports features are important when we have limited photos and so that we can highlight students specifically. All of these features use a different design layout but further our "see" theme. While all of these photos are posed differently, the design elements make the page feel cohesive.
Theme Feature
This design focuses around including as many students as possible. The inspiration for this design came from the feature pages from the Southwest Career and Technical Academy's yearbook. As this year has been completely online so far, getting students into the book has been like pulling teeth. With this problem, we still know that we have a goal of getting every single student into the yearbook at least three times. The design has a unique dominant and eye-line while still fitting in 167 students and furthering our theme ideas.
Reference
The student ads section has never been designed by the staffers. This year, I decided to change that. In my opinion, the ads designed by the parents are typically distasteful. I designed every single student advertisement. After I designed a ad, I would send it to the parent who bought it with the original and the newly designed one. Some parents do not like the advertisements I designed which is totally fine but I always want to give them the option to have (in my opinion) the most beautiful ad possible.
Overall, I think that yearbooks sometimes "neglect" the reference sections a little bit. I find that they aren't always as tastefully designed as the sports or the school coverage. To the left are some of my favorite reference pages that featured students in many different ways, truly highlighting the diversity in our school.