Design

On distribution day, a student could receive our magazine and throw it in the trash within five minutes. It's our job to create an interesting design that entices readers to hold on our product for a little longer. We have to find the perfect combination of white space, color, art, photography, and type. In other words, we aim for fun visual stimulation that supports and enhances good journalism, but does not seek to replace it. The fine line of design is finding an effective, engaging way to tell important stories, while making sure people stick around to read them. See below for some of my best design work from high school.

PRINT PAGES

For this year's winter magazine, I led the In-Depth (cover story) about teen phone addiction. Rather than offering an opinionated response to our big question ("Do We Have a Problem?"), I used data in a full-page infographic to let readers analyze and draw their own conclusions. For the cover, I used all practical effects (rather than digital art or 3D modeling). I used a pitch-black room, a smoke machine, and a phone on full brightness to create the aura of light around the screen (and the platform under the phone is actually a soap dish). Then I had a model pose separately in backlight, and I rotoscoped him onto the background phone image. I was very proud of the design of this In-Depth cover, and it impressed and intrigued readers.

Creek was ranked number one in the country for athletics in 2024-25, so for our fall magazine, we devoted a spread to this achievement. The USJ's sports team was having trouble finding a cool way to tie together 10 blurbs and one big graphic. I helped them brainstorm and created a torn paper collage. Though it could have been done digitally, we just used our office printer and our four pairs of hands, and we created the scraps practically. The resulting image was a colorful, catchy centerpiece that tied together a story about many individual teams.

The big question of our Fall 2025 magazine was "could the National Guard occupy Denver next?" As part of our investigative piece, I created this timeline page of Donald Trump's history of hostility towards our state, from little moments like his complaint about his portrait in our State Capitol to much bigger controversies like the Tina Peters scandal. I was proud of this page as a whole, especially the Trump/Colorado Flag art that I created and added at the bottom.

I consider this my best single-page design. This is the back cover of our Spring 2025 magazine. Our back covers are more graphic-centered than text-heavy, so I wanted to load up this page with photos. I started with some of my most visually striking pictures, then added an infographic to balance it out, combining geometric shapes with art and statistics. Finally, for the background, I made the whole page mimic the design of a hockey rink.

In our Spring 2024 magazine, our full news spread had too much text. We created a better balance by adding this full-page infographic about Creek's outlook on the upcoming 2024 presidential election. To include a school angle, we dedicated space to students who would be voting that year. I really like the white space we were able to work with and the color palette that united the other elements on the page. I also enjoyed making the map. I like maps.

This story won Second Place (Alternative Story Form) from CSPA.

Creek is lucky enough to be located across the street from one of Colorado's most beautiful urban natural areas, Cherry Creek State Park. Looking ahead to summer vacation, we focused our Summer 2025 magazine on CCSP, its wildlife, and how students use it to rest, relax, and learn. For my contribution (a piece on nature and conservation), editor-in-chief Quinn Rudnick and I created a map, as well as illustrations of resident animals. I added scientific names, inspired by nature journals and trail maps. We deliberately created the design around a color palette of browns, blues, and greens to evoke an earthy, natural theme of "land, air, and water."

This spread won Honorable Mention (Newsmagazine Spread Design) from NSPA.

In our Spring 2023 magazine, I was honored, as a freshman, to lead my first In-Depth. The topic was ChatGPT and how quickly it was disrupting the academic world, just months after its introduction. For the cover, I knew I wanted a striking image that merged human and mechanical features to show the slow transformation beginning in our schools because of AI. I posed the model behind a laptop, and later worked with our Chief Photographer to splice in a robot face. Many students told us the cover sparked their interest in the story.

This was the print version of the In-Depth schoolhouse story I worked on for our Fall 2025 magazine. I started with a vintage-parchment background and built on the faded look. This worked perfectly with the archival photos I found through my research, which I wanted to be the page's focus. I had to cut the majority of the story to fit the page (I published a longer version online), but I'm happy with the result. To read more about the whole story, see the Reporting & Writing tab.

A recurring part of our news section at the USJ is "News Bites," our take on quick, one-minute news stories. Brevity is important for busy high school students, so we try to fit two or three stories on one page with compact design to be visually engaging and efficient. It's a real challenge. I am especially proud of this News Bites page, in our Fall 2024 magazine. The page mixes photos and art, fits in touches of white space, while still making room for the stories. I was especially proud of the comedy/tragedy masks flanking the theater story. The idea came late at night just hours before deadline.

ART & INFOGRAPHICS

For one of my Peanuts and Cracker Jack columns on the 2023 baseball season, I made this digital image of the World Series-winning Texas Rangers. I traced the outlines of the players from photographs, then worked to match the colors, tones, contours, and shapes. It was grueling and tedious work, but I think it turned out well.

One of my favorite styles of photo illustration is a hand-made collage made of ripped and crumpled paper. For this graphic for my review of Season 2 of Severance, I tried to make the collage as unsettling and creepy as possible, to match the show's mood.

During a late-night editing session just days before our print deadline, our staff editorial team needed art to accompany their story, which argued that as high school students reach voting age, we need to use our voice and vote. I stepped up and quickly created this art that mixed a real-world issue with a bit of satire.

This graphic illustrated a story about an upcoming ballot measure for a bond to fund a rebuild on the Creek campus. We used the blueprint motif throughout the story, so in this illustration, I mixed that texture with the red and yellow color scheme of the ballot measure's campaign logo.

This art accompanied a story I wrote in 2023 about antisemitism in pop culture. The print version didn't allow space for art like this, so I made this graphic just for the web version. Similar to the Severance graphic above, I used a crumpled paper collage style mixed with digital art painting to fill in the gaps.

The story featuring this image won First Place (Lifestyle News Coverage) from CSMA and Best of SNO Honors.

I wrote a story about the trash and littering crisis on campus during my sophomore year. This infographic map of the Creek campus used information I learned from an administrator about the biggest trash problem spots on campus. I like how the design fit the mint-green color theme of the USJ's news section.

The story featuring this image won Best of SNO Honors.

This was my singular venture into the world of GIFs. For a Peanuts and Cracker Jack column, I needed to explain what "framing" is, and I couldn't think of a way to do it with a still image. So, I used Canva to make a GIF.

When we wrote a story about the SAT going online, we knew we wanted to make a graphic that visualized digitalization. I was very proud of this illustration because it immediately evokes the whole topic of the story.

This story was quite icky to write because I was suffering seasonal allergies myself while I wrote it. I used an earthy color scheme and added little particles all over the infographic to further emphasize the effects of pollen and dust on allergies.

WEB REDESIGN

As a junior, I embarked on a project to redesign our website. Below you can see the "before and after" images that show how I updated it. Before the redesign (left), our front page was dated and not especially engaging—blocky tabs, lots of dark colors, and bland fonts. My primary goal was to retain the layout of our site, while making it more visually appealing and easier to use. I changed the color palette from black/navy to a combination of space gray and royal blue. I made the blocky story tabs floating and less intrusive (but still easy to find and use). Our front page shifted from a text-heavy presentation to a layout that prioritizes images and color, with headlines in larger font that catch the eye and convince readers to click on the stories. To see the updated website in its entirety, visit unionstreetjournal.com

LOGOS

The USJ has gone through generations of awful logos. During my sophomore year, we decided to come up with something more updated, eye-catching, polished, and professional. We went through a drafting phase, with editors introducing their ideas. As you can see above, all of them were terrible, and the discussion sputtered. But as a rising junior, I led a final push to redesign once and for all. We allowed the staff to vote on several proposals, and we landed on a winner.

The winning logo was clean and simple, and it fit our color scheme. The circular logo was a perfect format for social media, as a profile picture and as a brand mark. Our rectangular logo was perfect for the nameplate on top of our website and for the cover of our magazine. Also, instead of keeping a singular color scheme, we realized we could adapt the color of the logo so it would better coordinate with thematic cover designs for each quarterly issue, making for a fun "special-edition" accent.

Fall 2024 "Blueprints"

Winter 2025 "Cell Phone"

Spring 2026 "Party Time"

Words of Recommendation

"Peter always has a surplus of ideas, which allows him to be a valuable collaborator and natural leader. He and I spent a lot of time scribbling on whiteboards to determine the exact angle of a story or where we should place a photo on a page. He would often be the first to step forward to take pictures or create artwork when the deadline was days or hours away. Personally, Peter inspired me to persevere when I felt uninspired and search for ways to integrate tactful creativity into my own journalism. Peter’s hard work reflects his personal dedication to journalism as well as the collective growth of USJ staff." —Amanda Castillo-Lopez, former USJ News Editor

"As a sophomore, Peter stepped into a leadership position as the Assistant News Editor. While his stories continued to excel, he pushed himself to learn Adobe InDesign and Photoshop to better suit the USJ’s newsmagazine. It’s a daunting task to be put in charge of designing four pages in only your second year as a part of a program, but he did it with the same intensity and passion that he brought to every other task." —Alex Gribb, former USJ Editor-in-Chief

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