Design
Zacks shows a 7th-grade student one of The Spectrum's feature designs as part of The Spectrum's 7th-grade journalism mentorship.
Perspectives Designs
This was one of the designs that took me the longest to make. I had to manually create and shape each “C” block on the InDesign file. My hard work paid off in the end, though, as I had a shape that looked very similar to a “C” (for Congress) and could use the colors of the American flag as the color scheme for the page. I also informed my readers of who their congressional representative was using data journalism. I contacted the admissions office and got the data for which cities Blake's students are from. I cross-referenced that with the list of cities in each representative’s district. I put all the duplicates on that list into a caption for my infographic, along with a phrase describing each candidate.
I enjoyed making this design because it was based on a resume, which went along with the theme of the page: High school students spending their high school years doing activities meant to pad their resume instead of activities they actually enjoy. There was a little bio at the top, the main points of the resume were split in half in the middle, and at the bottom were the references/quotes about the leadership. I also used more of a block design for this one to make it look more professional. This was also a chance for me to work on my data journalism skills by transforming survey responses into compelling visuals: Graphs, charts, and a uniform design for the quotes helped create the resume feel.
Opinions Designs
I enjoyed this design because of its creativity at the top of the page and uniformity at the bottom. I made the film camera the dominant element to emphasize the fact that the top article was a film review. I also used the uniformity at the bottom of the page to spread out the two college-themed articles. However, I still emphasized their connection by using the same shape for both of them.
This design was fun to make because it allowed me to truly embed the pictures in the story. I focused on the Halloween costume rankings, which were a fun touch for the story because we dropped our paper on Halloween. Making the rankings the dominant element of the page meant the design would stand out even more, which is why I used big numbers throughout.
Front/News Designs
This page was highlighting a community issue in Minnesota of the lack of snow last winter. I used a before and after comparison of similar spots in the student parking lot to truly show the lack of snow. I also used data journalism to show the large gap between the snowfall in the 2023-24 winter and previous years. In addition, the bottom article was about skiing, which gave the whole page a winter theme while also covering a variety of topics.
I was really struggling to find writers this cycle, so I adapted and chose to go with a creative design for a news page. I turned one of my articles into a series of CLOs to highlight affinity groups throughout the school. I also dedicated the top half of the page to a news feature on a longtime teacher who was forced to retire. In addition, I used the color purple in the photo at the top as one of my colors in the CLO package to create a theme throughout the page.