​Design
While Photojournalism might be my first love, Design is the one who haunts my mind late at night. There is a form of magic involved in creating shapes and rearranging text as you uncover the spread layout of the century (well, the best one you've created in the century). It has an echoing feeling of success that ripples through each year as I get better and better at seeing the bigger picture of a page. Below are some of my favorite and best designs I’ve created throughout my journalistic career.
Nighthawk News Magazine
Note: ​As an Editor-in-Chief, you have the opportunity to get your hands dirty in every single part of a deadline cycle. Whether it's editing stories or assigning multimedia, you get the experience of doing all the grunt work that everyone else assumes is only the job of a lowly staff writer.
​
This year, being an EIC has given me the opportunity I needed to take my design skills to a new level. Coupled with my knowledge of yearbook design and the boiled-down basics of making digital pages look good, I have strived to make Nighthawk News Magazine look as totally fire as it can using what I know (the latest example of this is the Born Viral article I've included below, where I used the logos of viral apps to surround and spell out the headline). Experimenting with the tools at my disposal makes anything possible, especially when you learn to trust the process (and yourself).
​Winter 2024
Shorelines Yearbook
Note: ​Everybody has a dirty little secret that would cause a stir if it ever got out.
​
For me, my secret is that I never took Intro to Publications - aka, the prerequisite class for the journalism programs at First Flight. Instead, I took two summer camps with NCSMA my 9th grade year and figured it'd be smooth sailing. I was only going to be taking Newspaper, so it didn't really matter if I didn't know much else. Right?
Long story short, I walked into my first ever Yearbook class junior year knowing absolutely jack.
​
Since then, I am happy to announce that 1) I know more than absolute jack and 2) I have armed myself with design skills on two different kinds of Yearbook software. I went from not knowing anything about bylines to being given the opportunity to design a spread entirely by myself (peep the Spring Musical spread on the right), and that was only last year. My skills are improving with every class, interview, and " 'Quote comma, Name said.' "
Shorelines 2024
Shorelines 2025
