DESIGN
Design is a key aspect in any story, drawing the reader into the page. The moment I get my story assignments I sit down with my partners and brainstorm all sorts of ideas for how we will present our final piece. We discuss art and photos and how we will lay out the story on the page to best use our space. Over the course of the cycle our floating ideas become more concrete as our story develops and the pieces fall into place. As production approaches we pull out our Photoshop and InDesign skills and bring our vision to life. Over my time with Verde I have learned to constantly push your design to be a better version of what it already is. That can come through big changes in layout or more nuanced alterations in fonts. The two designs I am most proud of are those of my second issue stories: "Digital deportation" and "This is their lane."
This feature discusses the role of technology in immigration enforcement, a topic tied close to home for us in the heart of Silicon Valley and in a state with over 2 million undocumented immigrants. For this story, our main concern was how we could create a dynamic design without powerful photographs. Our story focused in on a specific family of undocumented immigrants so any photos we took had to protect their anonymity and the photos we ended up with just weren’t compelling. So we turned to art and discussed how we could best capture our story in an interesting and symbolic fashion. We used monarch butterflies that annually travel between the U.S. and Mexico to represent the undocumented immigrants we were discussing and a sweeping net to represent the efforts of ICE to capture them. I used a cloudy light blue background to contrast the orange butterflies and make better use of our valuable color pages. We searched high and low to find the perfect font that tied technology into our design so that it effectively reflected our story and presented it in an appealing way.
For the art of this story we focused on the imagery of stained glass and took advantage of the color on our first page by making it a dedicated title page. To create continuity in moving to the black and white pages that followed, we continued the black fractured lines across the top and bottom of the page.
News Section
As a news editor, an important part of my role was designing the news section and making the three pages clear, sleek and informative. This involved lots of text edits to make the many stories fit together and lots of thought as to which stories are the most relevant and how they should be arranged accordingly. We used varying sizes of headlines to draw attention to certain stories and placed the most relevant in the top left.
While there are certain standards for news, we also like to make the section engaging by doing more than just big blocks of text. Above you can see a news story we formatted as a timeline which I designed for print.
Digital Design
My experience in the world of design extends beyond print into the virtual realm. All of my above stories and more have been published online and can be found here. While we apply similar principles of creating a dominant image, incorporating pull quotes and smaller images or art to break up the text and using color to engage the reader, there are also possibilities unique to online such as using multimedia (as discussed in "Web and Social Media") or organizing photos in slideshows or galleries. The below two photos are screenshots from my stories. The left shows a slideshow from a news story about Biden's election in which I used a photo slideshow to bring readers into the scene and add a colorful, interactive element to the story. On the right is a pull quote with an accompanying audio clip to help break up the monotony of a block of text and incorporating a multimedia element of audio.
Social Media
I've designed various social media posts and Instagram stories for my own articles and others. While social media is usually managed by our social media manager and/or digital editors-in-chief, at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, they were especially swamped so I stepped in to design some of our social media posts. I used Canva and incorporated art or photos from the stories and a pull quote to help capture the audience's attention. See a few of my designs below.
