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Design
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During the last months of my pre-journalism class, a class mandatory to be on The Tower staff, my teacher told me I should be a page editor during my first year on staff. Within the first semester being in this role, I found that I had no talent with design and I wasn't very good at using Adobe Indesign to create pages. This is one of the biggest personal struggles I have had to overcome while being on staff. Now, as a Print Editor-in-Chief, I have built my skills up to be able to help our page designers in class and make visual decisions on pages. There are a few changes that the other Print Editor-in-Chief, Charlotte, and I made together to improve the paper.
Layout
My first year on staff, the paper was a magazine style before it changed to broadsheet during the 2023-24 school year. With this change, the past editors decided to put the in-depth story on the front cover. As Charlotte and I were assessing what we would like to change, we knew this was needed. By having the in-depth on the first page, it was not as intriguing to readers as it could be.
For this 2024-25 school year, we decided to put the biggest feature story on the front, with two news briefs. We also put teases at the top of every page so readers knew they could decide what stories interested them most. We did not completely eliminate the in-depth from the first page, as we now have an in depth tease at the bottom of the first page. By making these changes we have had more reader interaction, and it has sparked readers to go past the first page, unlike the prior version.
Something I noticed after the first few editions of the paper, was that the front covertly stories were not always the most interesting stories. After about three editions, I suggested we put the biggest news story so even if students didn’t open the paper, they could still get some information from the headline. This idea mostly came from me knowing that many students don’t read physical newspapers anymore, but it is still important to get as much information across as possible.
OLD (2023-24)
START OF 2024-25
NOW
My designs
As a page designer, your first objective for every page is to have it look visually appealing, while also easily readable. For this page, it was challenging to fit the many headlines required to tell the story. I recall trying to have the timeline go vertically, but that didn't work. Eventually after much troubleshooting, I got the timeline to work horizontally.
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