Shannon Aardsma
With one foot in the creative writing department at my college and the other foot in the graphic design department, this project was the perfect mesh of my two degrees, though it was not nearly as simple as I had originally anticipated.
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The Brogue is the literary journal of Belhaven University's creative writing department. For years, a physical copy was made available to anyone who wanted it at the end of Spring semester, but somewhere along the line (probably during Covid), the journal became purely digital. The chair of the department wanted to change that, and I had to go and offer to make a physical copy possible again. "It'll be easy," I thought.
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I had some help, but not much. One of my graphic design professors was available to help me when I got stuck, and a couple of students gave me ideas, but they became too busy to help with the heavy lifting.
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So I designed the cover, formatting the layout, and kept in contact with the printer myself, during my senior semester when I had not one, not two, but three other senior projects due.
The cover art was provided by a former student and the University logo was available to me through my internship. The rest of the work I did myself.
All work was done in InDesign, with the exception of photo resizing and recoloring for which I used Photoshop.
Though The Brogue is the creative writing department's baby, all students are encouraged to submit artwork and writing to a jury of their peers, the Brogue staff.
I had to format both poetry and prose, avoiding orphans and widows whenever possible.
The edition I was working on had three sections: Childhood, Adolescence, and Adulthood. I chose to break up each section with artwork.
Two of my own written works were featured.
I chose to add a colophon at the end of the journal to further recognize the work done by myself, my fellow students, and the print shop we worked with.
Though the project turned out to be more complicated than I had originally anticipated, the process taught me a lot and made me very familiar with InDesign. And the sense of accomplishment when I finally held the proof in my own hands was worth it.