DESIGN
I wouldn't call myself creative, so design was hard to get into. Creating layouts such as Adobe Spark pages or our site layout wasn't too hard since I like things to be perfect and organized. But, creating digitally constructed images was a struggle. I've definitely improved over time and practice, and I'm proud of a few of them.
ADOBE SPARK PAGES
I will be the first to admit that our football slideshows are way too long. With usually at least two photographers at each game, the slideshows end up reaching 20 photos, sometimes even more. In my personal opinion, the gallery format in SNO is not the best way to present a large number of photos. I get tired of clicking through each photo individually, and I'm sure our readers do as well. I tried to encourage our photographers to try a different format, but I was outvoted by our photographers.
So, when I did an engineering slideshow, I decided to create an Adobe Spark page to show the photos rather than a gallery. I designed and organized the page to fit my photos, and I adored the way it turned out. I've since created more of these pages whenever I take photos, especially at pep rallies when we have many photographers and great photos.
Click on the arrow in the top right corner of the pages embedded below to view the Spark page in another tab.
PEP RALLIES
As I began to take photos at pep rallies (I talk more about this in the photojournalism section), we always came out of it with tons of photos between all of us. An Adobe Spark page was a great way to show all these photos. Each pep rally kind of has a color theme (Homecoming was purple, pink-out was pink, black-out was glow in the dark) and the Adobe Spark page makes that color theme looks awesome. I love scrolling through them and seeing the colors integrated throughout all the photos.
STUDENT LIFE
The photos in these pages were honestly average, but the pages made them look much better. It was a great way to cover academics and other activities in a unique way.
ENCOURAGING OTHERS
My Spark pages inspired others to create them. I've taught other staff members how to use the platform, and then they made their own with my advice.
DIGITALLY CONSTRUCTED IMAGES
Design is not my forte, but this year, I've ventured more into it and gotten far more proficient in it. I've graduated from using Canva, to using Photoshop and have learned a lot about the program. I've grown to love creating graphics for my podcasts or reviews, and I'm glad I've tried it. Below are some of my favorite graphics from this year, click on them to view some more information about them.
DESIGN SCHEME FOR PACKAGE
This year, I published a big multimedia package with two other staff members (I discuss this in web and social media portion as well). For this package, I created a design scheme to integrate into photos and pull quotes to create a coherent theme to the long package.
I first came up with two colors that would be used for every graphic, then I chose a font as well:
#9c0746
#ffb4e2
The "Little Cupcakes" font on Photoshop
The package basically told the love stories for eight teachers and staff members, and included a video and article over their story. Then, I had them send me pictures of them with their spouses, and I made these design elements.
First I made the featured image for the whole package:
Then for every person's part, I put their name on top of a photo or a collage:
Finally, to add some more design elements, I created these pull quote graphics, and a cute chart:
SITE DESIGN
Our staff is lucky enough to have a talented web designer and executive design editor. They've done a fantastic job of making our paper look amazing and it's their work that elevates our paper to a new level. We can have as many articles as we want, but we won't go anywhere if we have an ugly site. While they have done most of the work on our site design, I've also had a large role in overseeing these design changes as I approve them and give
advice and suggestions. They have an excellent eye for design, while I know more about our readers and what they would want to see on our front page, allowing us to work together beautifully.
To the left, you can see a side-by-side view of our site page from last year (right photo) and this year. (left photo). To the right, there is a more in-depth view of how I have worked with our designers to change our site. It includes the old site design, the proposed site design for this year from our web designer, the new site design for this year, and how we've changed that new design.
As this year went on with our three-photo recent stories format, we noticed that we've published too much for that format to work for us. We've always had a standard of publishing once a day, but this year we've published much more, averaging twice a day with some days at even more than three. Because of this, stories would go on the recent stories widget and get pushed off within the hour it was published. So, I asked our adviser and executive design editor if we could change it to the five-story format, and they agreed.
