Lissauer and co-editor-in-chief Maddie Schutte on-screen an opinions page. Before sending to the printer, Lissauer, Schutte and advisor Lori Keekley read every page. Lissauer screen shares each page to follow COVID-19 restrictions.
Design
News
My first semester on staff I designed a page every cycle. Despite my limited experience and knowledge in the artistic world, I always listened closely to the design editors to ensure I was always learning new skills. When I was news editor, I worked with design editors to come up with a design that worked for the content on the page. Even though design was never a strong suit of mine, I still took the time to listen and learn as much as I could.
The switch to newsmagazine
As soon as it became clear Park would be returning in a hybrid model, we decided to switch from a newspaper to newsmagazine. This meant redesigning and rethinking everything we do for print. We spent the first few months of the school year working on the big picture aspects like the placement of folios, formatting, table of content and the nameplate. After winter break, we still didn’t know when we were going to come back in-person to school so we decided to set a date two and a half weeks into the future to upload a PDF version of our first newsmag. This came at the end of the semester, so I, along with the rest of the staff, had to balance a heavier than normal workload with creating a newsmagazine for the first time.
The next two weeks were spent on Zoom every night meeting with designers to go over the pages, helping them when they were stuck and giving advice. I had never put together a print issue over Zoom, but many staffers had never put together a print issue at all — and I was happy to help. By the end of the two weeks I felt more comfortable than ever with InDesign. |
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As the day we were going to upload the newsmagazine approached more and more news stories came in that had important information that should be on print. Instead of squeezing three stories onto one page, I pulled out the key facts that students and staff needed to know and worked with a fellow staffer to place them on the page while making it easy to read.
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While I worked with all of the pages, I spent a lot of time working on our center spread. I worked with the designer through the whole process from inspiration to PDFing. Everytime the designer was confused (most commonly with text wrap), she sent me the file and I screen shared on Zoom to explain how to do it. We struggled to make sure the page was more than just text and was visually interesting. We ended up using the infographic as a visual element to help draw in the reader.
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Web
"What is the best way to show this story?” That question has been drilled into my head since my first day on staff. The idea behind it is that some content may be better presented in a podcast, video or photo gallery as opposed to just a story. I love that we focus on this as a staff, but it always bothered me that those elements were not highlighted the same when it comes to posting content on our website. So, along with the web editor, I added a multimedia tab on our website so our viewers can easily find and view all of those multimedia elements. When designing the multimedia tab, I put the photo galleries big at the top because usually our best photos are the first ones on a photo gallery so I wanted to highlight them. Before we added this page there wasn’t a way to find all of our photo galleries together, but now there is. Under the video category on the home page, you can only see the most recent video, I wanted to change that to show more than that as our video coverage has a variety of content. When designing the new multimedia page, I made podcasts tab more accessible to our readers because previously they were only featured at the bottom of the home page. |