Design
While I had very little knowledge of design when I first joined The MIHS Islander, through designing pages for our print issues and improving our website, I have learned many useful skills in design that will serve me well later on.
Print Newspaper Design:
Designing newspaper pages is certainly not an easy process, but I have come to enjoy it more and more with every page I design. With each page, I attempt to pair an article with an eye-catching visual and colors that make the page inviting and easy to read. Below are a few pages that I have designed for various MIHS Islander print issues in the past few years:
I designed this page for our 2021 Back to School Issue. The article pictured is a piece I wrote with current Sports Editor Asha Woerner in which we previewed the upcoming MIHS football season. To make this page feel interactive and stand out, I included a cutout of two players, as well as the team's home schedule for the year.
Designing "Inside," the second page of all of our newspapers, is one of my recurring tasks as Editor in Chief. While the layout generally remains the same for each issue, I play around with the colors to match our theme, and I decide how to best fill the space in the right-center box (on this page my co-Editor-in-Chief Lena Hardisty and I wrote a winter poem that previewed the paper).
When I first made a page sketch for this article on KMIH 88.9 The Bridge, MIHS' student radio station, I only included the text and the photo. To make the page more interesting, I designed the headline as a bridge to match the radio station's name, and I asked one of my fellow editors to design the "KMIH" and "88.9" graphics to make the page feel symmetric.
I was really excited to design this page because the article follows a question-answer format, which allowed me to venture from the typical three-column design of a page. I decided to emphasize the human-interest elements of the story by including a cutout of the person being interviewed in the story.
Website Design:
A major component of being Editor in Chief is managing and posting articles on our website. While I did not create the layout that we currently use, I have continued to edit and improve the website to make it as visually appealing as possible.
For instance, I have encouraged members of my staff to capture bright, colorful, high-quality photos to complement their articles. I have also posted a variety of articles in different sections to make our website more balanced.