Newspaper Design

While working for Rosebud Media (owner of the Medford Mail Tribune and Ashland Tidings), I designed and edited newspaper layouts, covers, and digital content on the newspapers' blogs and social media (we utilized Hootsuite for these tasks). I collaborated with writers, editors, fellow designers, and the press team in a quick-moving, efficient, and experienced newsroom.

One massive takeaway was how to produce quality content utilizing an organized workflow within the Adobe Creative Cloud. In this way, I applied the solutions I studied in school to real-world problems. Daily, I designed the covers and layouts shown below using an organized workflow to meet a deadline of roughly 30 minutes per page (sometimes quicker). I was assigned the majority of Ashland Tidings pages to design along with 1-3 Mail Tribune pages.

In general, my workflow was as follows:

I would arrive at my desk and research potential stories using a news aggregate system; participate in the daily budget meeting (reporting research and helping the editor-in-chief select stories for the next day's paper); receive and organize assignments according to the nightly deadline.

  1. Using InDesign and an Amazon Web Services cloud system (for transfering files), compose balanced and easily digestible layouts adhering to the in-house and AP style guides (as well as widely accepted design guides like The Newspaper Designers Handbook)
  2. Print a copy of the page and hand it off to another editorial designer on the copy desk for critique
  3. Start next page while waiting for feedback on copied pages or look over other designer's proofs for grammar, style, and design errors
  4. Make changes to page based on feedback and submit to the press through prepress software

I would then repeat 1-3 until all of my assigned pages were laid out, proofed, and submitted The layouts were crafted using in-house InDesign paragraph and character styles to maintain consistent headers, subheaders, paragraphs, captions, etc. from one issue to the next.

Software used:

Here is a selection of covers and layouts I designed under tight nightly deadlines (spending 30 minutes a page at most) while working at the Medford Mail Tribune and Ashland Daily Tidings newspapers. This process included copy editing, reading all copy and editing for grammatical or style errors (in-house and AP styles).