Design
The way we present our stories is often the deciding factor for whether people are engaged enough to read them. At the Southerner, I design and build pages every month for our printed publication and edit pages to make sure they're interesting and easy to understand. Additionally, I use multimedia elements when I design and post stories on the Southerner's website.
The Southerner page design
For interior pages, we don't use color and tend to focus more on the quality of the story than the visual aspects. Over time, this has led our staff to add one rectangular image to each story and call it quits on design, which makes the pages uninteresting and does a significant disservice to the stories. During the fourth cycle this year, we added more dynamic elements and spent more time on design, which led to a much more engaging paper. However, we still have a lot of work to do and are spending the break between issues four and five working on improving our design standards.
Page 1, Issue 4: familiar faces
For this page, I had one day to work with a small team of editors and build the main graphic and layout. While the general concept for the layout had already been created, the content for the page was late, giving us very little time to design.
We decided to feature the faces of all twelve students that received Posse and QuestBridge scholarships to grab the attention of our school community. By using these images, the page stands out to people who know or recognize the subjects and makes students and teachers more interested in reading the story.
We also used the orange color from the Posse brand and the logos from both Posse and QuestBridge to visually appeal to readers who were familiar with the two programs.
Additionally, Southerner front pages contain briefs at the bottom to give the reader a preview of what they can find inside. While writing these briefs, I realized the boxes had been stretched and were no longer uniform in size and spacing. I made new boxes for the briefs to ensure the page had complete consistency.
Page 12, Issue 4: adding details
This page was initially very simple, with just one rectangular image per photo. I took the design to the next level by cutting out the car graphic and exhaust clouds and adding an additional photo for the Trolley Barn story. I also fixed the contrast, brightness and framing for the images. For print, I try to err on the side of too light because our printers typically print everything darker. These simple adjustments and extra details make the page fun and interesting, and the car driving towards the message about expanded coverage brings more attention to our website, where we post most of our content.
Page 7, Issue 7: creative problem solving
For this story, we used a photo from our state's AP Day, where students met with members of the Georgia Congress to discuss funding for Advanced Placement classes. Photos were provided courtesy of a student who wasn't on the staff, and their composition was terrible for print. The subjects were too dark and the background was overexposed, and adjusting the contrast wasn't enough to solve the problem.
We had no time to get
better photos of AP Day
or make a graphic, so I
decided to cut out the
people in the photo. This
solved the contrast issue
because I was able to
adjust the brightness of
the people individually and I didn't have to worry about the background.
The cutout didn't just solve the contrast issue, it also made the page more interesting to look at and allowed me to fit a more dominant image. Since the text filled the background area, I had more room to increase the size of the image, which gives a bigger impact.
My mom has always said that limitations foster creativity, and this really proved that to be true. Since I had limited time and limited photo options, I had to think creatively about page composition, and it resulted in a more dynamic design.
Four page newspaper
For my final project in Journalism I, I was tasked with designing a four-page newspaper filled with my stories from the year. Today, that would take me a few days and be an exciting chance to use my creativity, but at the time, it was the most stressful and time-consuming project I had ever done.
This newspaper was challenging because it was my first time using Adobe InDesign, which, when coming from a background of easy tools like Google Slides, was an incredibly frustrating learning process. 14-year-old me literally cried when the images wouldn't scale correctly. Also, when I design pages for the Southerner, I take a copy of an old page and just change the text and design elements, which means I'm working from a template with an existing layout and folio. This newspaper was painstakingly constructed from scratch in a blank InDesign file, which made it even more work.
I've learned a lot about Adobe tools and print design since then, but looking back, I'm still proud of the work I put into this and love how it turned out.
I used a low opacity version of an image of the church the chorus performed in as the background for the front page. While I really like how that adds texture and separates the two stories on the page, I couldn't figure out at the time where to put the photo credit for the background image, so I ended up submitting the project without crediting myself. After two years on staff, I understand the crucial importance of crediting every image and would be more careful in the future.
Especially for a front page, it is vital that photos are taken by members of our staff if possible. For this story, I had taken some photos myself, but there hadn't any customers at the time, so I wasn't able to photograph the subject in action. Instead, I used a photo she sent me. I would rather have an image where the subject is looking at her work, rather than the camera, and now, I would make the effort to return to the salon at a better date and capture my own shot.
I named my paper "The Lyons Latest" because I do my best work late at night and finished many of my stories that year well past 1 a.m. I liked the play on words with the paper updating readers on the "latest" news. I had so much fun constructing this folio and it opened me up to the possibility of creating themed Southerner folios and logos for special events.
This story was completed as an entry-level exercise in photojournalism, so it just had photos and captions. I wrote the text here to give myself some body copy to work with for the design project. I have learned more recently that photo essays are most powerful when accompanied by interviews and stronger captions, so I will definitely prioritize interviewing my subjects in future photo essays.
One of the most important and commonly overlooked parts of print design is consistency. At the Southerner, we have a style guide that outlines the exact distance each element should be from the next to keep our pages as uniform as possible, but when I made this, I hadn't learned how to use it yet. The noticeable inconsistencies in spacing from page to page for elements like this line separating the stories detract from the professionalism and distract the eye from the intended focal points.
This was my first story ever and the photos I originally took of the bins of ice cream and sign didn't show the community aspect of the story that I was aiming for. I wanted better options for this project, so I returned at the end of freshman year and captured images of students from my school using the shop as a study space.
If I was writing this story today, I would have attended a "Chicago" rehearsal to get some shots of the subject on stage with the rest of the cast. This would support the theme of community throughout the story. Here, the story and images aren't very cohesive because the point of the story is that she made friends through the theatre program, but both images show her alone. The photo of her smiling at the camera does nothing for the story and should not have made the cut for the page.
I really like the use of this dominant image and think it's a great way to draw the eye to the story. Dominant images are my adviser's number one priority when he look at a page and he often returns pages without editing them because the top image isn't dominant enough. However, the quality of the image is just as important as the size. I got this graphic from an internet search because I just needed something for the page to help me practice my InDesign skills. However, if this were a real page, I would have drawn a graphic myself.
Again with spacing, the gaps above and below the two images on this page and the spacing with the captions is inconsistent. This is very easy to fix and is one of the details that separates Pacemaker winners from ordinary student journalism.
There was a missed opportunity here with creative design. The cutout makes the top story visually appealing, but the satire just has two relatively uninteresting rectangular images. If I were designing this today, I would play into the cold effect and add some sort of icy details to the story.
The images on this page are very boring. With photojournalism, it's important that the images capture the vibe of the subject, and the welcoming neighborhood feel I experienced in the salon does not translate in these images, leaving the reader very bored. The photo on the front page with the salon owner is better, but if I were printing this story today, I would focus more on the photos.
This design is very simple, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if I wanted to step it up, I could have used a cutout of the singer or played into the concept of rating the album with a graphic showing how many stars I gave it. The image here is the album cover and I should have specified that in the caption because it is unclear. I also spent much of the review discussing the singer's family and collaborators, so I could have pulled in images relating to that.
Website story design
I use SNO elements and long-form story format when posting stories to create a dynamic multimedia experience. During the election, I improved my posting skills because I had stories with several quality images and multimedia aspects and needed to learn how to properly utilize SNO to quickly post them throughout the election process.
Slideshows
For my story about President Carter, I embedded an image slideshow in the story to showcase my sources' personal connections to Carter. This allows readers to click through and view all four images and their captions, but only takes up the space of one image in the story. It's also a great way to group similar images.
Pull quotes
I use the pull quote feature to break up long chunks of text and highlight important quotes.
Immersive photos
For the Election Eve story, I used the immersive photo template so when you click on the story, the featured image takes up the whole screen. This photo captured the energy of the event really well and the aspect ratio made it work really well as a full screen image.
Immersive half photo
I also frequently use the immersive half photo template, which splits the screen between the featured image and title.