Oddly enough, at stressful late deadline meetings, I find peace in laying out In Design pages. I have a passion for both creative page designs and also designs following traditional journalism layout rules. I placed 3rd in the Illinois state journalism competition in 2016 for Newspaper Design and 4th in the same category in 2015. I am always flipping through my adviser's design books to come up with new ideas for our paper. I continually strive to grow my skills to create interesting page designs that interest readers and follow journalistic rules of design.
Master Facility Plan - Front Page
About: In the fall of 2015, the school board released preliminary plans for major renovations throughout the district. The graphic on the page was pulled from the actual design plans. Because the image basically just looks like a normal drawing of the school, the color-coordinated sections give clarity to where renovations will occur and their costs. The plans were still in such a provisional stage when the story was written that we found it necessary to include asterisks clarifying this.
Published: In print Dec. 17, 2015
Front page 12/17/15 by Abigail Murphy on Scribd
Flavin goes to Junior Olympics - Front Page
About: On our staff, the editors-in-chief usually take charge of designing the front page. For this issue, we were lucky enough to be granted permission to use these beautiful photos for the article. My main job for this page was sifting through all of the photos and finding which ones with work best together as a coherent design. I found these two photos to be the best quality but was conflicted about putting them together since the left image faced off the page and the right image isn't the most expressive. In the end, I made the executive decision to use the two photos because the left image was the most expressive photo and the right shows the gymnast doing her best event. We made sure to indicate this in the caption for the photos.
Published: In print May 24, 2016
Red Ribbon Week Speaker - Front Page
About: For Red Ribbon Week, our school had an author who wrote a book about her struggles with alcohol come in and speak to the student body. Unlike past speakers that focused on overall substance abuse, this speaker focused on alcohol and talked about excerpts from her book. In an effort to incorporate the main topic of alcohol with her powerful quotes from her book, I used a cutout image and quotes to create an interesting visual design.
Published: In print Nov. 4, 2016
Author speaks to D99 schools about alcohol by Abigail Murphy on Scribd
2017-2018 Calendar - Front Page
About: For my article about heat and the calendar changes for the 2017-2018 school year, I aimed to create a front page design that would be both coherent and visually appealing. I wrapped the text of the story around the graphic created by our graphic editor and added a color-coded fact box to fit in some of the data that I could not get into my article.
Published: In print on Nov. 6, 2016
