Teaching teachers

Last week I taught two design classes for the High School Journalism Institute at UNR's J-school. The purpose of the institute is to provide training, classes and food for thought for high school journalism teachers so that they can improve their print product back home, and, more importantly, teach their students.
I was completely nervous about this class, as I've never formally taught inDesign or design before. I've given plenty of crash courses to and helped out fellow Sagebrushers, but that's much different.
Overall I enjoyed teaching the class. In the three hours I was given I was able to give a brief presentation about design basics, do a walk through with the class and then set them free to work on their assignment. The biggest challenge was working with teachers who are not very computer savvy. I couldn't help but liken the experience to attempting to teach my father (we're still working on copy paste) design software. For the teachers who already had a vague understanding of what inDesign was capable of or had used another program, I think they really got a lot out of it.
After getting my start in high school on the newspaper staff, I hope that on some level, my design class benefits other high schoolers across the country.

First published photo

I took my very first photo for print last week. We didn't have any photographers available to take the cover shot, so I grabbed one of the Sagebrush D-70s and pretended to know what I was doing.
The idea was getting a few students together in Nevada gear near the Mackay Statue. This summer issue of the newspaper is marketed toward the incoming students and their parents who will be on campus for orientation over the summer.
Not the most exciting photo in the world, but it's in focus and gets the job done. Not bad for someone who has never operated an SLR.
I'm really looking forward to taking a photo journalism class in the fall. It will be really exciting to get some good photos to expand my portfolio.

Designing with no art

One of the most irritating things that can happen to me as a designer is when I find out that there isn't any art to work with for a story.
However, if you can still come up with a good design despite this challenge, you pretty much win the game.
The best example that I have so far of creating a compelling design without an illustration or a photo is the cover that I did for our budget special section.
Drawing inspiration from wordle, I created a word cloud that included important words that can be associated with the budget cuts. To do this, I went through dozens of stories that we had put together and picked out words or phrases that helped to tell the story.

A&E designs

One of the biggest challenges for me every week is designing the Arts & Entertainment cover. Because it requires more creativity and usually demands a much different approach than page one design, it can be easy to draw a blank when I sit down to design.
These are some of my favorite A&E Covers that I had a lot of fun working on:

Designing for fashion

A couple of months ago, myself, Krystal Bick and Amy Beck put together a spring fashion preview. For this project, I helped pick out models, pick the photo shoot location (the El Cortez hotel), pick out outfits, art directed the photo shoot, selected photos and laid out the pages. I think this is probably my best work so far.
One of the main challenges was making this fashion preview look different from the fashion preview we did in the fall. I think that this was successful. This is the fall preview:


















For the fall fashion shoot, we decided to go up to Mt Rose and take some photos in an outdoor setting. We also did a separate page for men and women. When we started planning the spring fashion preview, we decided to pick a setting that would be very different from fall preview. By choosing an old-fashioned hotel, we were able to get a very different theme.
The first idea we had when it came to designing the preview was that we wanted it to be more magazine-like. I had a lot of fun designing the cover to look like a magazine cover. We also decided to combine the mens and womens fashions into a spread.

Dining Guide

Last week we printed a special "dining guide" section in addition to our regular A and B sections. Our special sections always add extra stress to production weekend because extra workload often falls among a few people. It's always a challenge to create a design concept that is conveyed on front cover of the section and then carried through the rest of the pages. I've been working on the last couple of special sections to make them look different from the rest of the newspaper.
For the cover of the dining guide, a couple other staff members proposed the idea of spelling out "food" with different pieces of food. I was never completely sold on the idea, but other seemed excited about it so I went with the idea. After searching through bigstock for the right photos and trying to play off the overall feel with bright colors, this is what we printed:
I'm still not sure how I feel about the cover. Everyone that I've talked to, which includes our audience, seems to really like it. For the inside pages, I carried over the colors. Here's the first two pages:

I think it's a step in the right direction as far as creating an overall concept for an entire section.

Student Newspapers

Working on a student newspaper is a strange experience.
It is remarkable that a group of twenty-something students, whom each have a couple years of experience at best, put out a 20+ page pager each week (not to mention manage a Web site).
I imagine it is a constant struggle for designers far better than me to work with others who don’t have a lot of design instinct or understanding of basic rules. It’s hard to tell colleagues why their well thought-out design won’t work, when they clearly spent a lot of time thinking about it. I imagine it’s another constant struggle for editors to work with designers and other visual staff members who don’t have much experience.
This is where I’m at in my career. I started doing design for The Nevada Sagebrush a year ago. I came in once a week to help with a couple of basic pages. This past fall when the school year started again I found myself with the entire Design Editor position in my lap, and I had no idea what to do with it.
I look at other people’s designs and have a large desire to achieve what they do. Unfortunately, I have had no formal training and very little guidance when it comes to designing. Most of what I know has been self-taught, picked up from observing others, and learned along the way.
It’s been a rough year so far, but there's definitely been improvement along the way. Growing into my editor position took time, but I learned how to oversee the pages for a twenty-something page paper, how to work with section editors, and how to tackle design challenges.
Despite my limited experience, I have a strong desire to learn more about this field. This semester I’m working to learn more about graphic design, web page management and pushing my design to the next level. I hope to use this blog to document my progress.