Cherubs get tips on design

BY JOE BUZZELLI

Cathi Choi walked into Susan Mango Curtis’s visual journalism lecture pretty confident in her high school newspaper, and she had a reason to be. The Chronicle has won the National Scholastic Press Association’s Pacemaker award the past 16 years in a row and is known across the country for its design.

But Curtis found room for improvement. She said that The Chronicle lacked a consistent look throughout its pages. Though every page was designed well, they did not fit together.
           
“She told us each page in the paper can’t have its own voice,” Choi, of Los Angeles, said. “It needs a thread that connects all the designed pages together. As brilliant or genius as the design may be, if it doesn’t fit in, it won’t look good.”
           
After two design and layout lectures at the journalism program at the National High School Institute, Choi said the need for consistency is the number one point she learned and will definitely use that advice to improve her newspaper.
           
Choi is the design editor for her high school newspaper, Curtis also critiqued her new template for The Chronicle. Curtis was impressed by the design, but said it did not have the edgy-feel Choi wanted.
Megan Kozak works on a design template for her high school newspaper.
“Knowing that will definitely keep us more conscious of what we’re going for,” Choi said.

Choi was one of many cherubs who plan to take the layout tips and advice they learned from Curtis and Michael Deas, both professors at Medill, back to their high school newspapers. Taylor Long, of from Indiana, Pa., said the presentations were eye-openers.
           
“On our newspaper, we often trick ourselves into thinking all of our articles will be read,” Long said. “But they won’t be because they are so long and, honestly, boring.”
           
During Deas’s presentation, Long learned a new method for story telling in newspapers: charticles. Charticles are charts or graphics with brief bursts of text used to tell a story instead of an article.
           
“Just because something isn’t a full-on article doesn’t mean it’s not as good,” Long said. “That’s what newspapers are moving towards.”
           
Long said she knew content was important. But she did not realize how important design can be to attracting readers to an article. Long said she will definitely share her notes with her staff, especially her layout team.

“[Readers] won’t read your articles, no matter how good or how many interviews you have, if it isn’t designed well,” she said.
 
Megan Kozak, of Hawthorn Woods, Ill., asked instructor David Weissman for feedback on her newspaper. Weissman told Kozak that the font in her articles was hard to read because of its size and that her jumps were not formatted correctly.
           
“I’m actually redesigning the front page of my newspaper,” Kozak said. “His feedback was important to me so we could fix some of the things we have been doing wrong the past few years and perfect the newspaper. It’s good to go back to my staff confident that I’m improving the paper because I’m hearing this feedback from professionals.”

Choi was also glad to hear feedback from professionals.

“It was really nice not to be coddled by a professional in terms of how our design looked,” she said. “It was great to be told what our flaws were and how we can fix them.”