● National Student Journalist of the Year Runner-Up ●
My Portfolio: Design
In a world of breaking news, we're constantly focused on what we're reporting. Most of the time, however, how we say it is just as important. No one wants to read a 14 x 22-inch block of text. That's where design comes in.
Senior Map
Oh, Senior Map: The Spoke's annual tradition through which the newspaper chronicles the post-high school plans of its more than 550-person senior class. Last year, as the newly-instated Editor-in-Chief, I undertook the huge project that is the Senior Map. I spent more than a month gathering information and then a week designing the double-truck spread that prints in The Spoke's final issue of the year. Designing this infographic map was a challenge: I had to fit hundreds of data points in one spread without overwhelming the layout.
I went with a blue and orange theme for the map: contrasting colors that don't hold any extrinsic meaning (I loved the red and green combination, but didn't want it to look like Christmas threw up on the map). For the first time in The Spoke's more than 60 years of publishing this map, I added a separate, smaller world map to the bottom. Increasing numbers of students each year decide to pursue post-high school plans outside of the United States, and I decided that it was time to visually represent them in the famous spread.
I used every square inch of the map to tell the story of a Conestoga graduate. The road leading to publishing this map wasn't pretty (read more about this here), but the final product was worth it.
Front Page Designs
Over time, I've learned an unfortunate reality: a poorly designed Page 1 can make or break a student, teacher or community member's decision to pick up a copy of the paper. The Spoke traditionally publishes "the article of the issue" — our "Front Page," also known as the bane of the News Editor's existence. In all seriousness, the Front Page article is always long-form journalism, and it always starts on Page 1 and carries over to Page 3. The writers who work on the article spend weeks reporting, writing editing, re-reporting, re-writing and re-editing. At The Spoke, I've made countless Front Page graphics: they present a novel way to display information that attracts readers.
Conestoga's cutthroat culture (this article appeared in The Spoke's January 2022 Issue): In this almost 2,500-word article, I dove into incredibly important topics ranging from academic pressure to teen mental health to school intervention policies and practices. I administered a random cluster sample survey to Conestoga's homerooms to get a better picture of where the student body stood regarding mental health and well-being. I included the information in the written article but also provided a "By the numbers" section at the bottom of Page 3 to aid the reader. To avoid a wall of text, I put statistical information into head-shaped displays. On Page 1, I opted for a chalkboard-like photo illustration to catch the reader's eye. In the "News" category, this article placed first in the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association's state-wide competition and second in the National Federation of Press Women's national competition.
By car, by bus, by foot: A traffic trifecta (this article appeared in The Spoke's October 2021 Issue): It is really difficult to talk about traffic without a map. I knew that when I covered my school's bus driver shortage and traffic problems post-COVID. My pictures, as seen below, helped tell part of the story, but I knew that the piece was still missing something: a graphic! Part of my angle in this article was to highlight what students were doing to try to avoid the traffic problems. I made a graphic on the bottom of Page 3 showing where students were going and what they were doing to save those valuable minutes in the morning and after school. This was my first graphic — easy to say, it was difficult to learn how to visually display information — and while there are some tweaks I would make today looking at it more than two years later, I can confidently say that, in presenting the information in a more digestible format with pictures and colors, the graphic turned out just right.
Commonwealth court sides with public schools (this article appeared in The Spoke's March 2023 Issue): Not every story needs a big graphic. They can help present information, but sometimes the photos tell the story better. I learned this while reporting on a decision from Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court that declared the formula the state used to distribute educational funds unconstitutional. This story required me to look over a lot of documents and analyze a lot of numbers. I could have presented all that data in a graphic, but I knew that it would confuse the reader. I included the necessary numbers and used pictures to tell the rest. Rather than only relying on the quantitative aspects of unbalanced education spending, I showed the qualitative aspects: I drove around Pennsylvania and took pictures of neighboring schools — some receiving the most money, and some the least.
Design Rules By Which I Live
Avoid the Dollar Bill at All Costs
Let's face it: no one likes a wall of text. Readers don't like picking up a paper without pictures, and editors don't like laying out a page without any visual elements. Over the past couple of years, I've pushed The Spoke to adopt the "dollar bill rule."
As the rule goes, you should never be able to place a dollar bill horizontally on a page without it touching any visual elements. What does this mean? Add more pictures! Making a page more visually appealing doesn't necessarily mean taking away content; sometimes, all you have to do is re-order where photos and text sit on the spread.
When I was designing my own pages as the News Editor, I made it a point to follow the dollar bill rule. Now, as Editor-in-Chief, no page is finalized until I whip out my handy-dandy dollar bill.
Remove the Tombstone
There are so many random words that designers have adopted. One of them is the "tombstone" — no, not the ones you find at cemeteries; rather, the act of laying out two stories with headlines directly next to each other.
Easy enough, right? Well, not always. By changing headline location and style, you often have to redesign the layout of the whole story. But once you find the perfect layout that draws attention to every story, every photo, every headline, you can take a step back and admire your work.
The design of the page to the left took me a week to nail down. Not only could I not find a way to present each story uniquely, but I just didn't have enough content to fill the page. That's when I decided to include a stand-alone photo. As it always does in the end, the page fell perfectly into place.
Rely on Templates (to an extent)
As I stepped into the role of Editor-in-Chief, one of my top priorities was making templates for everything — from the graphics that go in every issue of the paper to the physical pages themselves. I gave these templates to the section editors at the start of the year.
I standardized the headline, body text and caption fonts and sizes. I standardized the space between every byline and the start of the article. I standardized what words we bold in captions and the thickness of bold we use. All of these are small; the average reader would overlook my many changes. But when put together, they create a more cohesive, clean and professional-looking newspaper.
That said, I always stress the importance of originality. Every page should bring something new. While I did not design the page to the right, those who did used my templates, style guide and layout rules to create it.
Page Templates
Some of the page and graphics templates that I made this summer. These helped the section editors lay out their pages as a lot of the heavy lifting was already done. Bringing page templates into Production nights helped expedite the process of creating the newspaper and reduced the number of layout errors I had to correct.
Social Media Templates
My templates didn't end in the physical paper. A standardized "look" helps a paper, an Instagram account — anything — look more professional. So, I made social media templates. These help keep The Spoke's "look" constant from the physical paper to our website to our social media accounts. Since creating and implementing these templates with The Spoke's Social Media Editor, our viewership, likes and reposts have noticeably increased. See what my templates and the final posts look like below.
