For Issue 9 of The Tower, I designed and executed the covers based on our main feature story about the culture of vaping at South. I wanted to demonstrate the addictive nature of vaping with a photograph, without romanticizing it by sharing its harmful effects on the back. Following the photoshoot with my model for the front cover, I was able to truly experiment with Adobe Photoshop for the first time in order to obscure their face and create the proper lighting and mood for the photo. I'm really happy with how these covers turned out.

This is the first feature spread I designed for The Tower. There was a lot of trial and error during its design as I experimented with incorporating the transgender pride flag and color scheme. I ultimately decided against using the flag because I felt like it took away from the photograph taken by our talented supervising photographer, Margot Murphy. Our adviser, Edge, was extremely helpful during this first big project, offering ideas and constructive criticism, and pushing me to create a design that I'm proud of.

This is the second feature spread I designed for The Tower. I  co-authored the story with my partner, Meghan Wysocki, as well as took all of the photographs. My main inspiration for this page came from the design holy grail, "Newspaper Design: Editorial Design from the World's Best Newsrooms." I wanted to demonstrate the pinnacle of the story: the facade of progress and the gentrification of Detroit. So, I decided the best way to do that was to create a visual divide between Downtown and the physical threat of pushing out current Detroit residents. This is what I came up with, and I'm extremely pleased with it.

During the summer of 2021, my co-editor, Meghan, and I re-designed our entire publication. The transition from a weekly newspaper to a biweekly newsmagazine was not an easy one, and it took a lot of work to create an entirely new style guide and templates with our limited design experience as copy editors and supervising copy editors. However, we eventually agreed on our design elements, and I spent several weeks of trial and error designing our new logo and page numbers. Along with these changes, I designed all of our page templates, including the introductory spread pictured below. 

This is a basic arts and entertainment single I designed for Issue 6 of The Tower. During the design of this page, the secondary article was cut in order to make space for purchased ads, which resulted in my first true exposure to ad layout. After placing the book review at the top of the page, I color-dropped a salmon pink from the cover in order to tie the page together with the brightness of the ads at the bottom. As for the ad layout itself, after the preliminary placement of the ads, I was able to puzzle-piece them together in order to create an appealing, cohesive layout.

Here is a sports single I designed for Issue 5 of The Tower. After one of our page editors was quarantined, I took on the page last minute. Although there was limited space to really be creative with this page, I think the basic design elements utilized throughout the page, alongside the focal image, made for a solid sports page. 

During the summer of 2021, my co-editor, Meghan, and I participated in Elizabeth Cyr's InDesign for Publications course at MIPA. At the end of the course, we both volunteered to be the creative managers for our class and designed these covers to correspond with our final project: a page spread of our design. Although we did not have a formal theme for our project, we decided to name our publication, "Evolution," to correspond with our tumultuous growth as journalists and designers throughout the pandemic. Alongside this title, we created floral covers to match, and utilized a green gradient on the title in order to emphasize the the flow of the title.

This is the first spread I ever designed. Under the guidance of Elizabeth Cyr, this double truck also led to me being awarded the InDesign for Publications Spartan Award-- which blew my mind. Looking back, the growth I've made over the past year is incredible. Although this page is visually very powerful, I've personally grown to enjoy purposeful white space in my designs, and while I certainly don't dislike this page, if I were to redesign it now, I probably would've given my design elements more room to breath.