jilli design 
The Miami Student Magazine Story Design Volume XVIII
project introduction
For this project, I was able to choose what story I wanted to design for the semester’s magazine by reading through budget lines and story proposals that writers had created. A few definitely caught my attention and spiked my interest, but as soon as I heard there was a story about Miami athletics and the basketball team, I knew what I wanted to do.
As a huge sports fan myself, I wanted to design something that I had never really dipped my toes into before: sports design. This story also happened to be in progress after Miami University’s basketball team was on its way to a perfect, undefeated regular season, and this was my way of contributing to that history. After reading the budget line for the story, I immediately had a vision: Miami University branding, big and bold type, type intertwining with imagery, and most importantly, imagery from Lindsay’s walls. The photos on her walls are an important part of the story because they act as moments in time within the story itself, hence the title.
ideation and process work
After creating a mood/style board (arguably the easiest and quickest I have ever made), it was time to begin my first draft. I began in Photoshop editing the photos mentioned in the story to use, and also began to make the title graphic. Once I had the images, I copied and pasted the drafted story into my InDesign template provided to me in order to meet magazine standards. Then I began to place images into the story close to where they are mentioned, and added some lines and a pull quote for small details to show my direction. With the images, I wanted some to be in black and white and some to be in full color to show the evolution of her college sports experience.
After reviewing my first draft with the magazine’s team of designers as well as the art directors, I received some helpful feedback and ideas to push my design further. Some feedback was to remove the obvious dividers within the title graphic, and add basketball court lines to the full spread, and bolden the words that start new sections of the story. There were also some edits and cuts to the story since the first draft. Adding the newest version of the story, as well as taking images out that were no longer in the story, were a part of these revisions as well.
final product
After multiple drafts and revisions, my design was pretty solid. I received more feedback and worked with the art directors to finalize the design within two days to meet the deadline for all designs. Some editions were small basketballs to divide parts of the story, polishing the title graphic, adding textures, and creating a fun final page since we had extra room.
reflections and learnings
From the moment we chose and were assigned our stories to the deadline for our final designs, we had only five weeks. We were given two weeks to work on each draft and then a few days to refine the second before submitting it to be finalized. That being said, this project and being part of this magazine have taught me many important lessons and skills within design. I have learned how to design for print, how to optimize parent pages, and how to meet strict deadlines within a short span of time.