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.