Newspaper Layout
While at the UW, I not only majored in Visual Communication Design, but also Journalism. It was through this that I found myself working for The Daily- the campus paper. After writing for them for a quarter, I managed to get myself on their design team. For the rest of my college career, I designed a section of the paper at least twice a week.
This work allowed me to fine tune my design to allow for easy reading. This understanding proved critical to my overall development- many of my peers struggled to understand why things weren’t perfect as long as they looked pretty. Functional design with a purpose- that’s my specialty.
Infographics are a major part of functional design because they allow the reader to understand data without having to delve deep under the surface of the issue. The reporter’s point is given an exclamation point and bolded. I grew very adept at turning data sets into graphics. There was a month where I was falling asleep and dreaming about using Tableau. However most of the data I worked with wasn’t a large enough set to warrant Tableau, and I was usually able to visualize it using only InDesign.
This job also gave me plenty of opportunity to hone my logo skills, as we frequently ran series that needed a cohesive logo to accompany them.
Below is a collection of some of my best work while with The Daily. It should be noted all design was done in a space of maximum 5 hours. So while there may be spacing I’d want to fix now, or a more elaborate design that might better highlight specific articles, the time wasn’t conducive to that sort of intensely critical design. It is nice, however, to see how much time can be a factor in quality, and how much better my quality of work got between then and my more recent designs.
