Main Squeeze Magazine

While at Southern Oregon University, I designed and helped edit the 2018 issue of Main Squeeze, the school's student literary magazine. I also promoted the call for submissions and print issue's release on social media before helping distribute it to readers and contributors. We had three solicited contributors—poets Rodrigo Toscano and Anne Boyer and fiction writer Robert Arellano—and a selection of student writers and visual artists. I contributed one short story which was selected by the editorial team.

I used InDesign to design the layout and Photoshop to process the selected artwork for print. I created the lime liner art in InDesign using stock images of limes and the name of the magazine repeated over the limes and layered using blending modes found in Adobe products. I used the same layering principle to create the layered text on the front cover. The subsequent layout maintained simplicity to keep the reader's attention on the content of the contributor's writing. I chose Garamond, a favorite typeface of mine, for the body text because its both readable and visually pleasing. I chose Futura for titles because it is a subtle sans-serif with the personality of an artist statement (and it pairs nicely with Garamond). I used generous line-height and margins because I believe the white space adds an appropriate weight to literary writing and art.

Throughout the process, I maintained an organized library of content and documented my workflow for the next team to take advantage of; this included style-guides based on the InDesign paragraph styles I used to maintain visual consistency and physical efficiency.Throughout the process, I maintained an organized library of content and documented my workflow for the next team to take advantage of; this included style-guides based on the InDesign paragraph styles I used to maintain visual consistency and physical efficiency.

We teamed with Your Town Press Inc., an excellent press located in Salem, Oregon, to get the issue printed. I put together a custom set of print and export settings to ensure the heavily collaborative project came off the press as intended and agreed upon on-screen. These print and export settings were also something I passed down to the next team in the documentation.

Here is the finished print issue and some selected pages

While designing the 2018 issue, I created social content for Main Squeeze that riffed on an unspoken citrus theme. Below are some examples, all consisting of photographed citrus fruit designed in a digital, colorful, loud style attempting to fit the student lit mag aesthetic of the magazine.

If I had the chance to take on this role with what I know now about social strategy, I would have set up a content management system like Hootsuite to make it easy for the team to schedule the content and keep our presence consistent with more initial reach and eventual readers when it came time to distribute.






I used InDesign for almost all the design work (besides image processing in Photoshop). For marketing and content management, I set up social business accounts on Instagram and Facebook and built a WordPress site. I wrote updates on submission deadlines and the release date on social and, in the blog section of the WordPress site, I wrote posts to discuss how things were going on the editorial side and some thoughts on the magazine's collective vision.

In addition to editorial design, I provided copy editing for grammatical and style errors found in selected contributors' final drafts.

Here is a poster I designed to announce the call for submissions around. I printed posters to distribute around town and posted digital versions on social.