Design
While on staff, I've never challenged myself in the design realm as much until this year. I asked our designers if I could create the center spread for our next issue of Eagle Nation Times. Since then, I'm so glad that I've contributed more to ENT designing, as well as to our social media and our website. I have challenged myself more through design and hope to continue growing in this area.
Digitally Constructed images
Although design is not my strong suit, I still put in effort to improve and learn from our talented designers. One way I incorporate design into my stories is through digitally constructed images. I make these especially for opinion pieces, podcast covers, album reviews, and I even make them for certain news topics that I cover for the newspaper.
Besides using design to create covers, and featured images for my stories I also use them to highlight important information in our opinion stories. By creating a graphic that stands out in the article it'll attract the reader to it and help them understand what our policy's are and make sure we are clear in our editorials, reviews, and columns.
Eagle Nation Times
One of the goals I set for myself this year was to design a spread for Eagle Nation Times – which is our print publication. I'll be honest it has been a long process from learning how to use InDesign efficiently to learning all of the rules, there's been a lot of trial and error. I'm lucky enough to have such talented designers on the newspaper with me, they've been giving me advice along the way. I'm currently designing the center spread of our Senior edition that will come out in March 2025. It is not fully done but below is the steps i've taken to soon finish the center spread.
1) First Draft
The first thing I did was brainstorm ideas on how I wanted my spread to look. The content for this spread is based on the Print Editor-in-Chief (Anisha Mandem) and the Eagle Nation Online Editor-in-Chief (me). For the content we are both working on writing a column on our journey as freshman all the way up to senior leaders on the newspaper.
Phone in hand, seniors Sofia Ayala and Anisha Mandem brainstorm their columns for the ENT center spread. "Its a lot of planning that Anisha and I have to do," Ayala said. "Not only that but we have to make sure we are on the same page regarding the content we are going to use for it."
2) Advice from designers
3) Updated Draft
I'm very far from being done with this design, especially because the content needs to be put in. I'm proud of the progress I've made so far because this is definitely challenging for me to do while also leading the class and meeting my responsibilities for the online publication. I'm excited to see how this turns out with all the content, and i'm glad I pushed myself to try out something i've never done before.
Eagle Nation Online Website
At the beginning of the year, when we were on track to get our SNO badges, I worked with our web designer – Mark Carbajal, and one of our designers, Yousuf Ali, to redesign the front page and meet all of the requirements for the Site Excellence badge.
Redesigning the masthead
One of the things we had to do in order to be on track to get the Excellence Badge was redesign our Masthead. We wanted to go for something that matched both of our publications – Eagle Nation Online and Eagle Nation Times. I worked with Yousuf to find the best design that will go with our theme and color schemes of our site. We tried out a lot of different fonts, and incorporating symbols too. We ended up going with the masthead design below, and I really like how it turned out. Its very different from our previous Masthead and I believe it represents the overall theme and tone of both of our publications very well.
