Design
When I first joined “The Hawk Eye” print staff, it was against my will.
I was one of three freshmen in the room, and among nine staff members that would return the following year. The print staff had just finished their first edition since the COVID-19 pandemic, which was the first time “The Hawk Eye” came in a news magazine, rather than a traditional newspaper layout.
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The design editor walked out and asked if anyone would be interested in print. I remembered flashes of my rough spreads from the design unit of our introductory journalism course, and felt much too inadequate to raise my hand. Upon the room’s silence, one of the seniors announced, “Krista will do it.”
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She turned to me, threatened to text my mom and make me do it, and I attended the meeting.
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A few weeks later, I spent the entirety of third and fourth period hunched over my laptop, staring at Indesign. It was a rusty process — I didn’t remember the first thing about basic design rules or which InDesign tool did what. But slowly, over the next few print editions, I began to hone my skills.
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Soon, instead of asking my design editor how to fill in rectangles, I began teaching others how to use drop shadows. I spent every class playing around with the elements on my spreads or giving advice to designers that asked. Before I knew it, design was just as integral to journalism — and therefore, my identity — as anything else.
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My passion for design led me to attending Gloria Shield Journalism Convention’s “Advance Design” class. There, I sat for four days, looking at spreads, learning about design and working on InDesign. I loved every moment of it.
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I joined a newspaper to craft stories, but learned to love laying them out just as much. That’s what I’ve gathered below: spreads that I didn’t focus on deadlines or color schemes — I just let imagination run until the pages were complete.
Designing the print edition
The first spread I ever did was a photo spread. It was nothing short of terrible.
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Though I got the almost required "Oh, this looks good!" that comes with showing anyone something you've worked on for hours, I look back at that spread with distaste. So, two years later, when someone needed to design a photo spread covering a year of sports, I was wary to volunteer.
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Over the next week, I spent too many hours staring at Adobe software to be considered safe, and flipped through dozens of photo spreads. I took little pieces from them all, and compiled together my favorite photos from throughout the year to create the spread to the left. It wasn't just something I was creating for the final print edition of the year, it was a version of redemption -- a way to prove to myself that I had grown.
This spread was done in the last two hours before we sent the pages to the printer. We had just received news from the main source of an article supposed to take three pages --- almost a quarter --- of the print edition that we could no longer run the story.
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As anyone would, we all panicked. I skimmed through stories that hadn't gone out yet that we felt were reasonable choices, and landed on this story to take two of the pages. I spent the next two hours making a cut-out, designing the headline and praying that the space I gave to the story would fit. Then, I honed every fine detail --- added "30/1" in bold letters to show the meaning of the story, went back to the code to make it more lifelike and adjusted the colors to make everything cohesive.
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This spread will always be bittersweet; I am proud of it, especially due to the time constraint, but I will always wonder what it could've been if I had more time.
Designing at Gloria Shields
By the end of the first day of Gloria Shields, my eyes hurt. I had spent hours staring at my computer screen or looking at various forms of design. Then, we were tasked with designing a spread the same way we would for school. It could be any story.
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I immediately knew which story I wanted to do; my in-depth article about the rise of caffeine consumption in high school students. My original idea was toned with browns and creams --- coffee colors. But we had spent all day learning about meaning in design: why a designer chose sharp edges and no curves or why the background was as filled as could be.
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So I scrapped all the original visions I had and thought of the major themes of the article: caffeine consumption had risen, in large part due to the marketing of energy drinks. They were bright and colorful, despite what was inside. I aimed to do the exact same thing with the bright layout.
Approaching the end of the Gloria Shields convention, we were tasked to do yet another spread. I had my own personal challenges all week; if I made one photo spread, then I wouldn't make another. The same went for feature and news spreads. By that last day, all I had left was an opinion spread.
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I was beyond lost.
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I had to find stories that matched without touching on the exact same themes. I found the story on the left first, then searched through "The Hawk Eye" until I stumbled on the opinion on the left.
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This time, I had an instinctual list of things to add to the page that mattered. I wanted sunrise colors to portray the story on the left, and I wanted to have something that showed love on the left. The two combined and I outlined shadows on each, then had the rays of sun chase away the darkness --- something touched on by both articles.
Online Designing
When I first began researching the increase consumption of caffeine among high school students, I instantly knew I wanted to do a story. What I didn't know, however, was how to get the most out of it.
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I knew that the article would dive into the experiences of students and teachers at Hebron, but I didn't know how to reach students through other forms of media. After thinking about it, I knew that, not only did I want to make an engaging layout on the website, but I also wanted a quick infographic and multimedia piece. That's exactly what I sought out to do over the next three weeks, and my result sits to the left.
For the first two years I had been on "The Hawk Eye" staff, we had never paired stories together. Photo stories were for events we didn't cover any other way; outside of that, our photography was limited to a handful of photos with stories.
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Covering the theater shows that year, I knew I wanted to make a change. What transpired from there became the regular design of similar events and sports recaps --- a photo story right above the news story. It combines the visual elements that captures a show with the information, along with allowing the journalist to share as much information as possible.
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To the right is a link to the musical coverage for that year in the new format.
Leadership in design
I have had the pleasure to be a designer for our print edition from the first year we brought it back, albeit not willingly that first time. Over the next eight editions the next two years, I watched our designers and stories grow. We began to tackle more difficult stories and putting them into our print edition, and we learned the values of white space and less color. Our designers became familiar with certain design principles and knew that almost anything we wanted to do could be done in Adobe Indesign. Here's a look at my role in the print edition the past few years.
Changing the process
Handling the stress
The running joke between designers is that we hate three things: meetings, InDesign and the print edition. Of course, we always jump at the chance to help for the next print edition, so the jokes just remain jokes.
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What little honest does trickle out of our constant humor is the stress everyone feels on print deadlines.
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In the beginning, my stress was over before it began. I finished my spreads with time to spare and had all the little things checked for. A year later, as managing editor, I became a part of the chain that overlooked every spread.
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It was the most stressful part of my job.
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Last year, we allotted only so many days for the print's editing. In order, it went through the me, the design editor, editor-in-chief and our adviser within two days. We all sat in one corner of the room, panicked.
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Handling the stress was something we had to learn. In the beginning, I spent too much time worried about every change I made and checking over every detail. By the end, I learned how to delegate a little more: I brought our multimedia editor in to brighten every photo in preparation for the gray paper. I checked the quick rules of design and made slight changes, while my design editor went after the little details of each spread. My editor-in-chief at the time reread every story and my adviser looked at the final product.
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Changing the formula revolutionized our speed and helped each of us handle one specific job.
Jumping into the print staff when our format was still so new meant it was a lot of learning as I went. Each edition was definitely improving, but we only had four editions to grow each year. On top of that, we had no set way to teach new designers every year what had taken us eight editions to figure out.
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But, like I learned from my years in theater, "the show must go on." So, too, must every edition.
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Over the last three years and eleven editions, I've been a part of the behind-the-scenes of every print meeting and spread design to come up with ways to improve. In terms of logistics, we weeded down the print staff from fourteen people to eight --- one person per spread. We also began allowing print exemptions, meaning that designing a page took the place of one of the reporter's required stories that cycle.
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But, with the increased competition came room for new ideas. How would we make sure our designers were as qualified as they could be without neglecting the chance to teach novice reporters?
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I had only one idea: everyone who chose to could design a spread, and, if their spread was within the best eight, they would be allotted a spot on the print staff. The others would be tasked with designing posters to hang around the school and help promote the edition. After a little bit of tweaking, we had a new process.