By Kaity Bergquist
As Editor in Chief, it’s my job to design the front page of the newspaper. I’ve been in love with page design since I first started designing sports pages at my community college newspaper in Spring 2011. My editor wasn’t going to start me on page design right away, but I was always in the newsroom to help, and it wasn’t long before I was designing most of the sports section.
I absolutely love page design. One of my proudest moments in my life was when I won the newspaper layout competition at the Journalism Association of Community College’s state conference. I won People’s Choice for tabloid and second place overall. I also won first place for a student-designed ad at that conference.
As a designer, I am a huge fan of typography, visual elements, and white space. When I was Editor in Chief of the Telescope, I took a lot of risks with my design. I’m always looking for a fun and refreshing take on newspaper design and how I can present our content for the week.
I’ve attached a picture of this week’s front page. I choose to run this great story about religious diversity as the lead package. Without any visuals besides the chart, I had to figure out how I wanted to illustrate the story. Since Ash Wednesday was a week ago, and the story talks about the season of Lent, I thought it would be appropriate to make an ash-looking cross.
Overall, the page is not that exciting. There’s a lot of text and not much color. One of the most challenging parts of my job is making the front page visually appealing. In print, the cross is very light. I probably should have made it darker. I think this is a pretty well structured page, it’s just not very eye-catching.