Kelly Arnold traveled 61 miles from Community High School in Ann Arbor to come to MSU’s MIPA program, with the desire to increase her knowledge of InDesign. She chose to take You’re Designing the Newspaper, a class taught by Jim McGonnell. Arnold’s school paper, The Communicator, previously a broadsheet layout, is switching to a magazine style this year.
“I’m hoping to get some insight about what looks good on pages,” Arnold said. “The teacher is really good about being honest about what looks good and what does not.”
Arnold, as well as the rest of the class, is working on today’s project: creating a spread about Zombie Run, where contestants run a 5k, and then other people chase them, while dressed as zombies.
“So far, it’s going well,” McGonnell said. “It’s a zombie insanity thing, and that’s a reason why we chose this project, because there are some really cool pictures that we can use.”
Arnold adapted quickly into the project-based teaching style, finishing yesterday’s project of redesigning The Communicator’s nameplate early.
McGonnell agreed with Arnold’s opinion, and added that the class as a whole is doing very well.
“The nameplates turned out really nicely,” McGonnell said. “They did something that they’re not used to doing at home and it’s going to give their paper a different look, hopefully their staff at home will be open minded and maybe even use one of them.”
Tomorrow, the project will be based on redesigning a page from each student’s own paper.
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