Graphics
Working on the print paper meant long whiteboard brainstorms discussing how to visually enhance our stories. What kind of image promoted the content without overplaying it? What highlighted the issue without being too cartoonish? Throughout my senior year, enhancing our coverage graphically was on the forefront of the work I did for our publications. While I wasn't always the one making the graphics, planning and brainstorming visual ideas for out paper was a requirement for our publication to be visually appealing.
After COVID-19 led to a dramatic drop in district enrollment, our school board was tasked with shaving millions of dollars of the budget.
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We got to work creating a huge multi-media package to inform our community of everything they needed to know about the issue.
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I designed a set of custom headlines to help lead our viewers through the package.
For this story, we had a reporter write a review of Tyler the Creator's new album. For a graphic, we decided to use a website that Tyler the Creator had launched where anyone can create their own travel license in the style of the album art.
We used Adobe Illustrator to dress up our mascot, the Chesty Lion, in Tyler the Creator's iconic "Tyler Baudelaire" outfit and put it on a travel license in the album style.
​The result was a fun mash up between the album and our school. Below is the album cover for reference.
This photo illustration was for a story about an increase of fighting at LHS, and specifically how student culture perpetuated it.
We choose to use the phone recording a fight to show how students’ first instincts to whip out their phones could be harmful by supporting the culture of fighting as entertainment.
The cover of our first issue is something I brainstormed for a long time. I knew our coverage would be focused on rebuilding, and I thought for a long time about how to portray that.
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Working with my design editor, we decided on a design that incorporated the iconic Chesty Lion statue outside of our school, and illustrated it to be in the rebuilding process.
The final step was to add colors to the Lion that mirrored the colors on our building's new school-wide mural. In the end, I also worked with another staffer to animate the design for our website.
For this page of the newspaper, we were running a short feature on a new club at LHS. We didn't have a ton of room to spice it up graphically because the rest of the page was filled with different content.
​To solve this problem, I thought back to one of the design ideas I learned at the Jayhawk Media Workshop over the summer: incorporating graphics into the text.
​For this one, I decided to use the color wheel logo, iconic of the club, as the "O" which helped bring some graphic flare without distracting from the page.
This was another colaboration between me and my design editor as we brainstormed for our first issue back from break.
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Me and my newspaper coeditor had decided the theme the issue around politics in high school. Because of events like COVID-19, the Jan. 6 insurrection and critical race theory education debates high school classrooms were more politicized than ever.
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I worked with my design editor to create this graphic for the cover - one that we new would catch eyes and turn heads. After all, the issues we were discussing were going to be controversial.
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The final touch was making the iconic "B" logo into an American flag for this issue.
Splitting the page into two very defined sections helped us to create a very clear partisan divide that resembled the current political landscape.
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