DESIGN
The photo above shows a wall in the Harker journalism room at the end of our Issue 2 production cycle this year. Winged Post editors could plaster the entire journalism room several times over with the number of heavily marked-up design drafts we go through each issue. Photo by Eric Fang
A poster I designed for San Jose City Hall in August 2018.
From designing front pages, news and global pages, back pages and center spreads, I have learned to look for creative and effective ways of conveying visual information through a combination of text, data, photos, illustrations and other elements. My progress in design has only been possible through countless hours spent devouring Youtube tutorials, scouring publications for design inspiration and revising each draft until it meets my vision.
In fact, the design I have learned through journalism has proven to be a lasting skill that has enabled me to better serve my community. When I interned for a San Jose City Council member in the summer of 2018, design allowed me to create interesting and informative posters for the good of the city’s residents.
CENTER SPREAD DESIGN
As students and teachers grapple with increasingly long commutes and high housing costs, I brainstormed ways of telling this high-impact story with not just words but also visual data. Using data garnered from Winged Post student and faculty surveys, I created a heat map showing where our students and teachers live and their corresponding commute times. The map breaks the fold so as to emphasize the distance that students and teachers are traveling in their commutes. I created a coherent look throughout the spread by using a consistent color palette for headlines, graphics and fast facts.
With temperatures and sea levels rising across the world, I wanted to emphasize the global scope of climate change. To do this, I made a map showing the locations of sinking cities across the world, which allowed me to visually unify the spread. I took advantage of the white space to highlight alternative design elements like key statistics, dates and pull quotes, while being careful not to over-clutter the design. I maintained a local focus by making an infographic that centered our school’s own sustainability initiatives.
With this spread, I wanted to put the political involvement of Harker students front and center. For a dominant visual, I made a bar graph that compared the Democratic frontrunners’ national polling popularity with the results of a survey I conducted among 140 Harker students. I had two columns of quotes running down the outside edges of the page: one column with quotes by presidential candidates and one with quotes by Harker students. I used this mirrored design to place equal emphasis on the voices of Harker students and the voices of U.S. political leaders.
FRONT PAGE DESIGN
A front page is the first thing a reader sees. If not designed well, it could be the only thing a reader sees.
With this in mind, we balance conveying a wealth of information with emphasizing eye-catching visuals. Since the front page is important for setting the tone of the rest of the paper, our front page designs are usually the result of a group collaboration. This way, we can get diverse sources of input on the page’s look and impact.
The page on the left is the design vision of last year’s co-editor in chief Prameela and I and my assistant editor, Arushi, assisted in executing the design. The page utilizes nontraditional headline font and one large dominant picture to draw the reader in, along with the inclusion of infographics on San Jose’s air quality index and on ways to help the wildfire recovery effort.
One of the biggest changes that my co-editor in chief and I have pushed for this year is the incorporation of large attention-grabbing illustrations on our pages, and we are fortunate enough to have a large group of talented artists on staff. For this front page on the PG&E power outages, I worked with our design editors Nina and Jin and my co-editor in chief Gloria to establish a clear and eye-catching dominant with the help of our staff illustrator Michelle. We decided to color-swatch the headline with the yellow and blue of Michelle’s illustration to symbolize lights going out. Further, we text-wrapped the copy to lend a fluid and unconventional feel to the page.
Here, my co-editor in chief Gloria, the assistant features editor Emily and I worked together on a front page for our May 2020 eight-page special edition package on the Bay Area Housing Crisis.
Emily’s amazing illustration establishes a unifying theme and color palette that reappears throughout the entire insert. The stylized headline and subhead places special emphasis on words such as “build housing,” “moon" and “do it here.”
BACK PAGE DESIGN
When my journalism program attended JEA/NSPA’s fall convention in Washington, D.C. last year, we visited NPR’s headquarters. A journalist there, Hannah Allam, was impressed by this package and later tweeted about it.
For this back page on the effects of Bay Area power outages and wildfires, I traveled two hours to the heart of where the Kincade wildfire had burned last October and November.
Using pictures I had taken of the fire’s aftermath, I anchored the page with a strong, horizontal photo at the top and balanced it with smaller photos at the bottom. The vertical map I made draws the reader’s eyes down the page. I made sure to feature human faces on the page by including headshots of the people I interviewed, which also showcased the diversity of perspectives in the article.
TABLOID PAGE DESIGN
Compared to special issue pages like the back page, interior pages have more design rules that limit how crazy the page can get. This is to help the paper look consistent throughout. At the same time, as news editor I tried to liven up traditionally news pages with compelling visuals and unconventional stylistic choices. For example, I often had my dominant visuals break the folio, creating a more dynamic design. In addition, I used a mix of cut-outs and rectangular images to create visual variety and white space.
BROADSHEET PAGE DESIGN
Before we redesigned the newspaper last year, our pages used broadsheet dimensions, which are longer than tabloid dimensions. The length allows for more articles to be on one page but can make designing tricky.
With broadsheet designs, I was careful to avoid smothering the page with too much text, dulling the design by making it too “blocky” or committing the age-old taboo of tombstoning.
For more on our newspaper’s redesign process, visit Entrepreneurship.
On this page, a dominant visual offers a point of entry to the top of the page, and a timeline at the bottom provides an airier anchor to the page.
To break up long text blocks and effectively convey information, I used alternative elements that highlight key dates, definitions and facts for each article. The different shapes and gray tones of these elements offer some variety and room to breathe, and an infographic at the top serves as an eye-catching and informative dominant visual. Headline hierarchy also helps guide the reader through the many elements on the page.
INFOGRAPHICS
Here is a closer look at some of the alternative design elements I have made.
I created the map on the right to show the area of three large-scale planned power outages that affected many Harker students and staff last fall. Pacific Gas and Electric Company had released their own maps but only for each county. To make a more informative graphic for our student body, I pieced together maps the company had released for six counties across three timepoints, showing the scale of the outages across time and space. I overlaid important statistics on the map so as not to waste an inch of space.
Above are three maps I created using InDesign and the programming language R to show where students and teachers live, along with their corresponding commute times. Darker colors indicate a higher density of students and teachers residing in that city. The maps tell a story – teachers tend to live farther from school than students and have a longer commute time by 11 minutes on average.
For more on how I collected this data and learned to create these maps through coding, visit Web.
I worked with one of our illustrators to create the above infographics for the center spread of our housing package. We strove to find creative and informative ways of visualizing data beyond the traditional bar graph and pie chart.
With this bar graph, I aimed to share how Harker students’ political preferences stacked up against national polls in a visually striking and easily understandable way. I used the white space created by the bars to convey fast facts about each candidate.
One way to highlight community faces and voices is to include headshots and quotes in our page designs. I designed these compact “Talk around Campus” elements that can be used as templates for section editors across multiple contexts.
In a survey about Harker students’ political preferences, I asked what national policy issues they cared most about. The answers? The environment, gun control and education. Knowing this, I created an infographic breaking down the candidates’ stances in a way that was specifically tailored to the student body’s interests.
This is an example of an “Upcoming Events” box that we used on a sports page in Issue 3. We use these repeating elements on front pages and interior pages.
I designed a compact and eye-catching way of displaying key facts and statistics, along with their sources.
I designed this “Save the Date” element to display key dates.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
I go through several drafting and revision stages before I arrive at a design I am happy with. Below are some of my early drafts next to their final forms.
This early design lacked a clear dominant visual. The arrangement of pictures on the righthand page also created some awkward trapped white space.
For the final design, I chose a color palette that complemented the colors in my photos. I had the headline running across both pages to create a more unified spread, and rearranged the pictures to establish a clear dominant visual. The final design is more dynamic than the earlier draft, using a variety of visual elements to guide the readers through the page.
This early draft is too “blocky,” and the bar graph takes up valuable space that could otherwise be used to convey information. I had planned to make some kind of infographic with a U.S. map, but U.S. maps have been overused in our designs on national politics.
Here, I am able to convey a lot more information with the same amount of space. By placing the candidates’ photos over the bar chart, I saved space and created a dominant visual unique from any of our previous designs.
DESIGN EDITING
As editor in chief, I provide feedback and edits to the design of every page in our 16-20 page newspaper, starting from the initial sketch. I comment on upwards of a dozen drafts of each page and work closely with editors to brainstorm and actualize their ideas.
The two pages to the right are early drafts of the sports section for one of our previous issues. The left page suffers from being too text-heavy, and the cut-out in the bottom left corner awkwardly floats on the page. The right page lacks a clear dominant, and lines created by the different picture sizes create a disjointed look.
BEFORE:
BEFORE:
After working with our sports editor, we came up with the following designs below. The left page includes more student faces and visuals to break up the text blocks, and a mix of horizontal and vertical elements guide the readers through the page. The right page showcases a strong photo for a clear dominant visual, and the design is cleaned up for a sleeker look.
AFTER:
AFTER:
THE LOOK OF THE PAPER
Each publication has its own vibe, a unique look and feel that is maintained largely through its design. While my co-editor in chief and I encourage our editors to come up with innovative designs, we implement certain style guides to achieve a consistent look throughout the paper.
To help section editors standardize and design their pages, we created a stylesheet and a design checklist.
The stylesheet is an InDesign document with every type of headline, body text or caption that would ever be used on a page. This template provides the correct fonts and sizes for items ranging from banner headlines to photo credits. Editors can simply copy-paste the desired text into their pages, and the fonts and sizes will all be preserved. This year, we reformatted the stylesheet to reflect a slightly smaller text size for subheads and proper alignment of photo credits. We also drew extra attention to the fact that there should be no periods at the end of pull quotes, a common style mistake we observed our editors making.
In November 2019, I created a checklist to streamline our editing process. Editors use the checklist to make sure they fix as many common mistakes as possible on their pages before turning in the final versions for me and my co-editor in chief to review. The checklist has three categories: photos, content, and design. Under each category are items such as “All statistics and outside info are correctly attributed” and “Articles have at least three interviews.”
For more on how we decided the look of the paper, visit “Redesign” under Entrepreneurship.