Design
Print issue pages
"Social media is not Satan" | First year on staff
This is a page I created for Issue 4 of the print edition my sophomore year. This was my first year on staff, and the first time I stepped outside of my comfort zone to create something with a more unique (and less cookie-cutter) design. I drew the illustrations on this page in Photoshop. I am not an artist, but this would be the beginning of a long career of miscellaneous illustration. This page received an All-Florida ranking for Opinion Page/Spread.
"Trial by (holiday) television" | Second year on staff
This story consisted of a ton of mini reviews, so I pieced them together in a format inspired by the sorts of entertainment magazines that were popular when I was younger. I also drew all of the little icons that appear around the page.
Issue 2 cover | Third year on staff
My senior year, for the first time, I was assigned the cover design for our second print issue! I drew the Statue of Liberty in Photoshop, created a starry background and requested a film reel illustration from the Advanced Digital Design class. Once I got the illustration, I placed photos from throughout Homecoming Week in the reel, warped the photos so that they matched the shape and filled in the spaces between with black. We debated for quite some time how to balance showing enough photos to create the desired effect with making each photo big enough to be visible. Eventually, I cropped the illustration of the statue to make the entire graphic larger. Just the process of adding the photos into the reel took around four hours, but this is my favorite page I have ever designed.
"High risers" | First year on staff
I don't think anyone knew that I designed this page. During a year when we had a less-than-ideal number of reporters on staff, I opened this page as I went through InDesign files for our print issue, realized that it was completely blank and put my head down to start designing. I experimented with repeated motifs (the dollar signs in this case), a design technique that I would continue to implement over the years.
"Luigi Mangione is not hot" | Second year on staff
This story is pretty straightforward and I really loved the illustration that had already been done for it, so I cut out pieces of the original image in Photoshop and arranged them around the page so that it surrounded the entire story. This page received an All-Florida ranking for Opinion Page/Spread.
"License to stream" | Third year on staff
I love a fun headline. The illustration for this story that went with it on the website was very blocky and didn't fit well on a print page, so I gave it an entirely new "glitchy" design to match the theme of the story.
"Mental health: How to reduce the stigma, and why it matters" | Third year on staff
We made a last-minute decision to make this story a two-page spread instead of a singular page. I really liked the look of the photo that went with this story, so I took some sticky notes in the same colors as those in the dominant image and wrote out statistics on them. I rolled them up partially to give them a more three-dimensional look, took photos of each, cut them out and added shadows in Photoshop, and placed them on the page.
"Buzz off!" | Third year on staff
This was a solid, informational well-written story, but it was far shorter than most that we assign full pages to in the print issues, and only took up about one and a half columns at its original length. Because of this, I created a sidebar providing information that was relevant but not redundant. Kayla, the writer of the story, took a photo of one of the interviewees, and I took photos of as many bees as I could find on campus. (Yes, this involved hanging around trash cans during lunch, and yes, it was made considerably more difficult by the fact that bees are not the most stationary of creatures. I'm nothing if not committed.)
"One last run" | Third year on staff
Everyone at Hagerty recognizes athletic director and coach Jay Getty (even if they don't know his name), so the most important part of this page design was having a picture of him. The layout (with the image behind the main story) is something we haven't done before, but it was very fitting for this.
"Humor me" | Third year on staff
I worked with the writer of this story, Michelle, to create this spread. We decided pretty quickly that we wanted to go with an exciting style reminiscent of a comic book, and sketched out the layout of the spread. From there, she added text and boxes to stand in for the photos. Most of my work on this spread was creating the colorful design elements (the title, the pull quotes, the QR code box, and the illustrations) and editing the photos. I showed Michelle how I achieved some of the effects with each photo, and gave her some extra illustrations to place around the story where she thought they should go.
We also had a really awesome video that went along with this story on the website, so we incorporated it into the spread as a QR code.
Illustrations
During my first and second years on staff, I did a few illustrations here and there, mostly when I needed something simple for a print page, and usually for my own stories. However, when I became a senior, our former Print Editor, Josephine, who had until then done all of our major illustrations, graduated. This year I've been familiarizing myself more with the brushes and tools in Photoshop (which I use for digital illustrations), and I've been drawing more for both print and online stories. I don't want a missing image to be the reason that someone has to delay posting their story, so developing this skillset allows me to be there for my staff in one more way.
Illustration for "Louder, not deeper" by Kwan Chit Ng | Third year on staff
Photo illustration (edited and drawn in Photoshop) for "Death is a dead trend" by Michelle Santana | Third year on staff
Illustration for "Humor me" by Michelle Santana | Third year on staff
Illustration for "Honors is NOT the new Standard" by Lia Miller | Second year on staff
Illustration for "Our Take: Censorship a serious threat to liberty" by the BluePrint Staff | Third year on staff
Illustration for "13 going on 30" by Isabella Ross | Third year on staff
Illustrations for "All in" by Luca Huff | Second year on staff
I drew several small illustrations for the print issue, which were then duplicated and used as an element all over the page
Illustration for "In the moment: 'Do you listen to Clairo? (6'2" btw)'" by Adriana Monsanto | Third year on staff
Illustration for "Killing me (Micro)softly by Lia Miller | Third year on staff
Logo design
We use logos for Recurring Content created by our staff. RCs are columns, podcasts, video series and more that each person is responsible for producing two of each quarter. We place logos in the print issue and in YouTube videos (for podcasts) to signify that an article of piece of media is part of a recurring series. I designed the logo for our Opinions Editor, Kayla's RC, a podcast reviewing music albums called "Spin It Again!" I also created the logo for a staff member, Kwan's column, a series of anime reviews called "Anime Zone," from a draft that my advisor gave me.
Instagram posts
Social media posts increase our engagement greatly, but in order to get students' attention, they need to look pretty! I use Canva to design Instagram posts highlighting cool stories that we write, and giving the student body updates on newspaper-related topics.
Below are some of my previous designs, and the captions that I posted them with.
CAPTION: Curious about the newspaper statistics from the last year? We've compiled all that beautiful data into a couple slides!
Happy winter break! The BluePrint will begin posting stories again on Jan. 6.
Click the white arrows to the right and left of the images to view more pages of the post.
CAPTION: Happy Literacy Week! This year's theme is "Read, white and blue."
Here are some tips on staying news literate, and why that's important.
If you want to learn more about declining literacy rates, check out the story "Lost for words" showcased on hhsblueprint.com.
Click the white arrows to the right and left of the images to view more pages of the post.
CAPTION: What do black cats, the number 13 and walking over the Hagerty emblem have in common? They're all bad luck—at least according to superstitions.
Staff Reporter Michelle Santana collected information about routines and lucky habits of faculty and students.
Comment your own campus superstition, and check out the full story, "As luck would have it," currently showcased at the top of hhsblueprint.com.
Click the white arrows to the right and left of the images to view more pages of the post.