Literature Journal Design

I designed a literature journal from start to finish. Every detail I handpicked. This is a link to the project and an aesthetic apology explaining my choices.

For my capstone project, I was Editor-in-Chief of a literature journal of my own inception. My small group and I created the idea, sourced pieces, and designed the entire journal from the cover and fonts to the details like the page numbers. It is here where the limits of my technical skills and creative skills were pushed to the limit. After a semester, what resulted was a beautiful, sixty-page journal full of visuals and art that elevated the works we chose to represent the theme. We told a brand new story with our writing and design choices.

This is a link to the project!

In my group's literature journal, You Are Here: Thoughts from the Immigrant Experience, we worked hard to give a voice to the first generation immigrants in America that are often silenced or overshadowed. The journal theme began as the idea of a dream journal. Similar to MLK’s famous speech about dreaming for equality, we wanted to examine the dream immigrants come to America to find, the American Dream. The idea of the American Dream has been heavily criticised for its rosiness and it’s oversimplifications of the struggles many immigrants face, so we wanted to hear specifically from first-generation immigrants about their experience with this phenomena. The overall size and shape reflected the origins of the journal. It is 9x6” which mimics the size of a pamphlet or a journal while also distinguishing itself from the typical book dimensions to allow it to stand out to readers.

We went through a couple of titles before landing on our own. The first was “American Nightmare,” which would represent the struggles immigrants faced and how the American Dream as we know it is usually impossible to achieve. However, this idea was tabled to avoid presenting too negatively. The next idea was “I Have a Dream,” in reference to the famous MLK speech that we drew inspiration from. We decided we wanted something that was more closely related to immigration. Our runner-up title idea was “Ladder.” This title had a lot of interesting logo ideas and had a twofold significance of the socioeconomic ladder that immigrants have to climb (a central idea to the American Dream) and also represented the menial service jobs that many immigrants are forced to take in order to provide for their families. We decided to go with You Are Here because we felt “Ladder” gave off a more formal tone than we wanted. You Are Here plays on travel and map imagery. It can be read many ways from relief at getting to America to being trapped in a position they can’t get out of. This way, it applies to a wide variety of people. It is much more playful and tongue-in-cheek than our other options and allowed us to play with bright color and humor in our pieces. The subtitle, Thoughts from the Immigrant Experience solidifies the relationship of the journal with immigration and also provides background information on our authors, who are immigrants that finally get to have their thoughts and feelings represented.

For our content selection, we scoured the internet on databases such as Galileo, Google Books, Poetry Foundation, and others to find our short prose works and our poetry. This resulted in a lot of digging because we wanted to make sure our authors were actual immigrants but also that we weren’t over-representing one country-of-origin immigrants in our works. By the end, we had three fiction pieces, three nonfiction, and three poetry from American immigrants from all across the globe. We ordered our content with fiction first, then nonfiction, then poetry. We wanted to keep the genres distinct rather than intersperse them throughout so that the pieces are more organized to a reader and easier to find. We had fiction first because those spreads were strong and we knew that the average person would be more interested in reading more creative fiction pieces than autobiographical ones. We thought our spreads for poetry were extremely strong, so we thought that would be a great way to close out our journal. This left creative nonfiction in the middle of our book, but that doesn’t mean it was ignored. We worked hard on these spreads to make sure they did not get monotonous or boring so that readers would stay engaged and turn pages.

Our journal opened with the title page, masthead, and table of contents. The title page features our logo, a map “pin” with our title. The background of the pin is a map. If a reader looked closely at the map in the background, they would find that the map is of New York City. New York City has a rich history with immigration in America. It was the original hub for federal immigration and every immigrant coming to America got to sail past the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty. The masthead and table of contents begin the motif of primary colors. These colors, red, blue, and yellow, are sprinkled throughout the journal and give the journal a bright, fun aesthetic. The masthead has a white outline of the Statue of Liberty and includes the names of the editors. This white outline on a colorful background is also a motif that returns on our section breaks. Our table of contents was inspired by many other journals that we found, but we put our own spin on the form with our own colors, fonts, and overall shapes. The numbers are visually centered because those are what is most important to locate pieces. They are also separated by section, like the contents itself. The result is an organized, easy to read, but exciting table of contents.

Our page headers were more like “side-ers.” Originally, we had the title of the journal and the page number on the vertical right side and the author on the vertical left. However, we determined this crowded the page too much so we reduced the headers to just the page numbers, within our signature pin logo, on the outside margins of each page. The page numbers changed color from yellow, red, or blue depending on the section and also moved down the page for each section. Fiction was at the top of the page, nonfiction was in the middle, and poetry was at the bottom. This kept the layout interesting and changing in keeping with our general aesthetic. The two main fonts we used were EB Garamond and Happening. EB Garamond was used for the main text body, authors, and page numbers. We chose this font because it was traditional and readable, especially as compared with our title font. Although it was traditional, it was not too formal or strict and still offered variety to keep it interesting. Happening is a web font that we used for titles, the cover, and pull quotes. We chose this font because of it’s visual connection with a Ben Shahn aesthetic. Ben Shahn is an artist and author who is known for working on pieces about immigration and social realism. The fonts he uses for his books are similar to Happening. This font is also very jaunty and wacky, like it was cut out of a magazine. This adds to the playful and off-beat theme our journal has and we wanted to integrate it a lot into our journal pages. It was a hard font to work with, but the effects were amazing.

Images played a major role in the formatting of You Are Here. We used over fifty different high resolution images to add color and life to our journal. We avoided more realistic photographs in favor of illustrations or drawings because this gave us the chance to be more whimsical and add more color and life than if we used still photos. Still photos would have given us a much more serious tone, and we wanted to keep it relaxed. Originally, we had several page-long pull quotes. We forgoed these for images and that is one of the best decisions we made. There were several instances in which we edited images in order to morph them into the entire page or spread. This took a lot of work, but it really added to our work and showed the creativity and passion that we put into each page. It helped break up the monotony, especially in the middle of the journal, and the colors looked amazing. 

I was Editor-in-Chief of You Are Here. Because of this position, I had a lot of different responsibilities in a lot of different areas. I was in charge of planning, organizing, and leading our many team meetings and dividing up tasks for the week for every member, as well as making sure they were on track through the week. I also presented our work during our in-class meetings. Beyond this, I took a very active role in the creation of the journal. I worked a lot in Photoshop; I created both our first cover and a second cover and edited many of the images and pages that became the image spreads that integrated into the story. I worked one-on-one with several group members as they created the Table of Contents, title pages, and overall journal formatting. When we found a few pieces that did not work, I found several extra pieces that I converted to raw text and uploaded. I put all of the pieces together and formatted them in a single, 70 page, original document. I made many of the complicated spreads myself and formatted all of the pull quotes. In general, everything ran through me for final approval and I was on call 24/7 to help me team members whenever they needed it. I am really proud of some of the decisions that we made. Particularly, I loved our image-integrated pages the most. The cover was one of the best pieces we created as well. I also am proud of the decision to change the color and position of the page numbers as well as replacing the full page pull quotes with images instead. All of these resulted in a journal I am proud to say that I made. 

The rest of my group also worked very hard to make this journal come to fruition. Andrew did many feats in Photoshop that I could never have imagined and was very on the ball. He was always ready to help, even scheduling meetings with other team members to help them through some details. He created the masthead, table of contents, section breaks, and also worked hard in Photoshop to edit images for those integrated spreads. He even got down to the nitty gritty and measured every single author name and dingbat to be exactly the centered and consistent throughout. He knew InDesign very well and was very helpful and instrumental for the journal. Bailey collected, organized, and sourced a majority of the raw text files and a majority of the beautiful, high resolution images that made our journal so special. She helped pick the images for each piece that connected to the content of the story. She also worked in InDesign to edit typos, issues with hyphenation, and rolled with anything that was asked of her. Jackie formatted the imported raw text with our paragraph styles in InDesign, took notes during every meeting which she uploaded as a checklist each week, helped to design the overall layout and order of the pages, and was also ready and willing to tackle any challenge that I threw at her. This team worried me at first because we were all so different from each other and dealt with a lot of combating issues in the beginning, but we all worked hard, grew closer, and the journal really reflected that.

In conclusion, I learned a lot while taking this class and creating our journal. I had never worked with InDesign before and hadn’t touched Photoshop since I was in high school. I become a lot more fluent and comfortable using these programs and making new and original content within them. I’ve gotten to the point where I use them in my everyday life; I don’t know what I’m going to do when my access expires! I also learned more about the process that goes into creating a book. I have always been very interested in publishing and marketing: from editing pieces to actually creating visual spreads and advertisements. The skills that I’ve learned in this class will directly carry over into my future career. I have also learned a lot about leadership and how to lead a small group of other students. It’s one thing to help and lead a big group of people you don’t know, but it is another to have to be in charge of and be stern with an intimate group of your peers. On top of that, we are all students with lots of different assignments and commitments that sometimes have to take priority. This really helped me to learn to be flexible and forgiving, while also still being firm enough to lead this journal into what I knew it could be. Overall, this project has helped me to learn a lot in a variety of areas and I am proud of the result that came out of it.