Graphic Design For Social Media:

Journalism 390 - Visual Communication for the mass media Class

During the spring quarter of my third year at Cal Poly, I had the pleasure of enrolling in Journalism 390 - Visual Communications for the Mass Media. This was one of my final journalism classes for my degree. My professor Brady Teufel served as an exceptional mentor, imparting invaluable skills to our class. We were introduced to various software programs, including Adobe's Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and others. These software skills proved instrumental to visually communicate, inform, educate, and express our creativity. It was truly gratifying to participate in this class and expand my graphic design and visual communication skills. By merging my background in photography, photo editing, and writing, I found myself embarking on a journey in the hopes of someday mastering graphic design.

Magazine Spread

I absolutely loved this assignment. I have a serious love-hate relationship with Indesign, but either way, I love making layouts, and one day dream of working for a magazine where I can input my creative ideas into a spread. I was heavily inspired by the magazine I-D for this assignment. I love their theme of highlighting music, fashion, art, and ideas. I also love their simple, modern, yet also somewhat vintage aesthetic. I really wanted to replicate this style in my layout spread. I copied their signature I-D logo on the cover and turned it into my own initials L-T. I also used my own images. During my winter quarter, I took an Editorial Photography class where we were given the assignment to be inspired by our favorite photographers and pretend we were them and given an editorial assignment. I was inspired by my idol Ryan Pfluger, and I took a Vogue article about how social media is impacting Gen Z's mental health. I quickly found a rights-free article titled "How Gen Z is Fighting Against Big Tech." I knew immediately that this article was perfect! My idea with the images was to showcase unhappy teens being choked by tech wire and holding iPhones. With my layout design, I wanted to incorporate moody dark colors as well as modern fonts and design. I struggled the most with fitting the text into columns and wrapping the text around my images.

Newspaper Recreation in Indesign