Design & Magazine Production

How To Design Marketable and Palatable Content

The magazine spreads featured here are apart of The Clypian news magazine "Banned" that won "2nd Runner-Up" at the 2025 Fall Media Day

Magazine Design

When designing a spread for The Clypian, I envision bringing the story to life. While it sounds silly, I mentally pick out what is most important and try to make that a dominant visual feature. Although I want the visual aide to compliment the writing, I do not want it to take away from it, being too distracting or taking up more space than the piece.

Here, let's analyze why this spread is objectively "good." For starters, it's cohesive, with design elements and colors. Natural hues are used all throughout the spread and connect both sides. Dually, there are visual aides throughout the spread, and they are varying sizes. This helps direct the reader's eyes and assist with the visual flow. And most importantly, the design builds off of the writing, allowing the reader to further their understanding of this profile feature.

While it's not an article, designing the table of contents is still very important! This is the first spread our consumers see when they open our magazine, so it's imporant it's visually appealing. Once again, this spread works because it has a flow from one side of the spread to the other, a strong visual aide. More so, the spread has dark/neutral tones with pops of color. This is important as it doesn't overstimulate the consumer, distracting them from taking in the content. And finally, everything on the spread is organized and has a section. Everything has a label and is distinguishable.

Yearbook Design

Designing spreads for yearbooks are rather similar yet vastly different that magazine design. I view the yearbook as more a snapshot design, almost building a story around pictures instead of the opposite for the magazine. The same rules still apply, though. A "good" yearbook spread requires either an interesting background image or color, a catchy title, a correlating image and of course, color. What varies here, though, is the implementation of theme. Typically, yearbooks are themed, this one is no different. For this yearbook, the theme is "Take Your Time," and an element of this MUST be incoporated into the spread.

This spread works for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, the cutout dominant photo is relevant, high quality and it captures alive emotions -- this is what visual media is all about. And the photo? It's what the girls do after every set, win or lose. It's their tradition and apart of their team character, which is important for a moment-specific spread like this. Next, look at the background, it's a volleyball student section cheering for our home team. Nothing screams "snapshot" like a moment of embrace.

Of course, it includes a chunk of body copy, going in depth on the spread topic. Finally, what ties it all together is the theme implementation. This spread's title is "A Moment of Excellence." There is a clear connection to "Time" here and the accentuation of the key words in the title only adds to that.

While this spread is body copy heavy, it still works. And, there are a lot of components on the spread, no doubt. But because they all have space and their own area, it creates visual line breaks. This makes the information digestable and allows the eye to hop from section to section.

The colors in the title contrast the fauna-heavy background, which draws attention to it first, which allows the consumer to understand exactly what they are looking at.

Front Cover Design and Methodology

For a news magazine like The Clypian, the cover is one of if not THE most important part of the magazine. Not only does the quality of the cover affect whether or not kids will actually pick it up and read it, but it sets the tone for it.

In many of our past issues, we have had mediocre or out-of-place covers. We'd yet to have realized the power of a magazine "theme" or "identity." And, I hated that. After my junior year, I was desperately searching for ways to improve how our magazines look. I looked at other student papers and I understood that their covers actually SAID something, and it wasn't just a random basketball picture from the google drive. But I wanted to build off of that. I wanted each issue to have a distinct, unforgettable branding.

I knew that if I wanted to create change and evolve our status quo, then I had to do it for myself and show the younger staffers how to do it. When one is a leader in a creative forum like media, you have to pursue the trial and error of product progression.

What's unique about it, though, is that the theme was based off of whatever the OP-ED piece that issue was. The staff opinion, the op-ed is typically one of our most important and best written pieces, so it only makes sense that it's the central branding for the issue.

Let's look at the two we've produced thus far and analyze them:

Issue 1, October 2025

The first issue we produced under our new methodology, and it was a smash hit. This paper won "2nd Runner-Up" at this year's Fall Media Day, something we'd never been close to in my tenure on the paper. But, bias aside, I believe this cover was a main reason why the judges thought highly of this paper.

As it was the first issue I was producing under this new style, I knew it hand to stand out.

Firstly, the title "Banned" is so standoffish that it almost invites begs the reader to open it up to find what exactly IS "Banned."

We based the photo and the subsequent OP-ED piece off of our state legislature banning phone use in Oregon schools.

But what I really love is the volatile color of the green, it's so bright, abrasive and it was definitely controversial -- but that's why I did it. It was controversial just like the topics that the OP-ED piece adresses, so through and through it's unfiltered in-your-face media, which I love.

Issue 2, December 2025

Unlike the last issue, this one didn't come to me as quickly as I wanted. I was unsure of what the OP-ED would be, and I needed to know that before I could create a brand for this issue. But it was Christmastime, and with the current state of our government and the lack of funding for the non-elite, I knew what it would be. A piece about raising minimum wage and providing better resources for the entirety of our society.

Something like this requires unity among our nation, thus the title. And with the season among us, the Christmas tree seemed fitting. It was located at a local coffeehouse in downtown Salem; the Broadway Coffeehouse is a inviting space for all, so photographing just made sense.

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