A case study in print design
How my skills in news design apply to UX
After becoming interested in design late in my college career, I worked for three years as a news page designer and copy editor for community newspapers. To be a journalist, you have to be curious and empathetic about the people and subjects you cover. To be a designer, you have to arrange information & images to assist in telling a story without distracting from it. The users, aka readers, must always be at the forefront of successful design.
A keen eye for detail lent itself well to my additional role as a copy editor for cleaning up copy, both for typographical errors and clarity. Brevity is best — especially when limited by square inches on a page. As a copy editor, I constantly learned how to convey information effectively, extracting the highlights into concise headlines and sub-headers.
A mirror image
In designing this page, I took inspiration from the main photo. The headline shape, color and style reflects the ballerina’s pose looking into a mirror. White space is used as a powerful design tool to draw attention and give more weight to a story. The typography style and color set the tone as well.
That winning feeling
For this sports story, I edited the main image in Adobe Photoshop to convey that the story is about leadership. The gravity of the bolded headline also communicates strength and a confident, winning attitude. A lighter grey font color for the supporting text also shows contrast and hierarchy.
Rooted into the ground
For this story about a program connecting farmers, I used more space in the font kerning and a contrasting brown font shade to match the tone of working off the land. It is offset from other stories on the page with an extra padding of white space, visually giving the eye a break from lots of copy.
A serious problem in shades of grey
This was a heavy subject matter and challenging to capture visually. I used multiple shades of grey to channel that seriousness and a wide range of font sizes to show that gravity. The breakout graphic preceding the story is data visualization in action, putting the reality of the problem into perspective. Context is everything in breaking down numbers.