I love doing page layout. It’s extremely fun for me to find the right story placement, the right font, the right photo, the best line weight, and packaging the paper.
I learned page design during my senior year in high school (’05-06) when I was editor of our school’s underground humor paper, The Symposium. I wanted the paper to look as legitimate as possible (to give the Onion-style paper some sort of ironic authority) so I downloaded an outdated version of Microsoft Publisher and spent weeks learning how to make make layout visually appealing.
When I became the Arts & Entertainment editor of The Hiram College Advance in the spring semester of my freshman year in 2007, I was responsible for for my section’s layout. The paper was using Microsoft PageMaker on PCs at the time and printing in all black and white.
I further developed the skill when I took “Desktop Publishing” as a junior at Hiram, learning to use Adobe InDesign on Mac computers. When I became editor-in-chief of The Advance, I decided that the paper should be fully designed using InDesign and for the first time used color printing. I designed the front page of every issue and collaborated on design within the other sections.
Here are a few examples of my design work throughout the year.
High School
My first attempt at page design (January 2006)
My second attempt four months later
Before
This is how the paper looked before I took over design of the front page or changed the layout guidelines.
After
For my senior year (’09-10), I started using Adobe InDesign for layout and printing in color. I designed the front page and many of the pages inside.
2008- Here’s an example of a page I designed when I was Student Life editor for the fall semester of my junior.
