It’s one of the rules of all good publications: grab the reader with the layout; hook the reader with the content.
At Hillsdale, the first half of that equation falls to students like junior Meg Prom, designer for Hillsdale’s award-winning magazine The Forum and assistant editor for the Winona yearbook, and junior Michelle McAvoy, designer for the Tower Light.
“Design gives it an air of professionalism,” Prom said. “I’ve seen publications that are just a wall of text. You’d immediately want to put it down. I think design enhances the story. It’s like when you’re little. When there’s no pictures, you’re not having as much fun. It’s a fun little game with your eyes. It’s not just a monologue. It’s more of an interaction, drawing not just your eyes, but your mind.”
Making the layout pop is a challenging puzzle, according to McAvoy.
“The Tower Light editorial board will pick the submissions, but then it’s up to you to make them fit in the booklet and fit together, pairing photos, pairing poems, fitting everything together so it’s cohesive,” McAvoy said. “Planning ahead is important, so we’re looking at paper prices and meeting with the printers now so we don’t run into trouble later on and go over budget.”
While working this summer with Capsule, a professional designing company, Prom learned there are three steps to design: ideation, creation, and finished product.
“It allowed them to be both creative, but very efficient,” Prom said. “When they were beginning, ideation is what they called it, they would put up basic designs on magnet wall board things and do these giant word circle things to come up with a name for a product. Originally I had no sense of separating an idea from a finished product. I still refer back to their website.”
For Prom, inspiration can come from anywhere. Keeping a portfolio of paint chips, textures, typography, and websites on various topics from interior decorating to woodworks, Prom uses these tools in her designing.
“I look at professor’s wardrobes sometimes, the really well dressed ones, because the colors match so well,” Prom said. “Like, that would look so great on a page! I think inspiration can come from everywhere, you just have to look for it.”
Themes are extremely helpful for designers, helping to keep a cohesive strategy throughout the work.
“It all starts with a theme, and from the theme, you can choose paper types, cover types, and that can play into the layout,” McAvoy said. “A simple, more clean layout is what we did with the Tower Light last semester like other literary journals. For the upcoming Tower Light we were tossing around the idea of doing an old schoolbook theme, so definitely more elaborate, fancier, intricate graphics, a different typeface, something more detailed.”
Graphic Design and Media Coordinator Aaron Sandford ’14 designed the Winona and Tower Light as a student.
“Layout is about organization,” Sandford said. “It’s the skeleton that keeps the pretty flesh of the publication. If a page is poorly laid out, it’s hard to tell what’s important, and you can’t really skim it.”
He said that organizing the Tower Light intuitively was an easier project than the yearbook, in part because of the Tower Light’s good table of contents and order of pieces selected by the editor.
“You have more audiences, content that’s hard to place into parallel categories, and more flexibility about what to include,” Sandford said of the yearbook. “Encouraging people to browse the book is another challenge when people tend to be mostly interested in the pages directly relevant to themselves and their friends.”
Aiming to create a “flow” for the year, Sandford used Overhead quotes, a timeline, and a chronological section so the audience could know what next to expect.
Junior Hannah Leitner, the Collegian’s design editor, got her start in design working on her high school’s yearbook. She described yearbook as a “scrapbook” and said that the Collegian follows stricter guidelines, focusing more on the stories than pictures.
Most important stories are near the top while less pressing articles are found toward the bottom.
“[Pages] are a certain size, and there can’t be any white space,” Leitner said. “It’s a challenge because of the balance of it and keeping it clean. You can’t have too much text or too many photos.”
Hesitant to share the ways editors “cheat” in order to fill their pages, Leitner mentioned using pull-out quotes and increasing the size of photos to changing headline fonts and their sizes when white space remains.
If there’s too much content, then the editor has to cut down the story. Increasing the number of columns helps. Having page jumps, although unpopular, allows for extra content on the more attractive color printed pages too.
The tools learned with student publications have benefited Sandford in his career with graphic design and media.
“I can use software quickly, I can identify problems readily, and I have a significant repertoire of solutions that I can bank on,” Sandford said.
While the designers of these various publications have different ends, their goals of creating a simple, attractive work remain the same.
“The idea of designing is to bring emphasis to the content, not distract your eye,” Prom said. “A beginner mistake is you over-design things. It’s all about easy on the eyes. You’ll know very complex designers with very simple imagery.”
