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I spent two years with the CMU Marketing Department as a student Jr Designer, which meant I had just enough institutional immunity to get away with things I probably should not have. Whenever I pushed a layout a little too far, or created a spread for an article that absolutely did not exist, I could shrug and say, “Students, right?” Most of the time the response was something like, “We need to tone this down,” or the more memorable, “Why did you make an article about fascist ducks? That was not any of your assigned spreads.” But on the occasions when no one intervened, I actually got to design some pretty great magazine layouts for a real published magazine that people actually read.
I hate orphans and widows.
Learning layout and typesetting has been a long and very humbling learning curve for me, which I imagine is a shared experience for many designers. Aligning grids with photographs, pairing type with illustration, and trying not to cry while typesetting a pull quote in the required style taught me a lot about patience and practice. Even with plenty still left to learn, I loved how print let me blend concept, composition, and storytelling in a physical format that does not disappear when someone refreshes the browser.
Layout's a puzzle. a truly aggravating puzzle that I enjoy.
My process usually started with reading the article and pretending I understood the author’s vision. Then I would sketch three versions of a layout: a safe idea that would pass approval instantly, a wild idea that would get me a confused look , and a compromise that usually ended up being the approved result. After that came the digital build, where. Paragraphs wandered, word counts revolted, and captions expanded without consent. Still, wrestling the content into a layout that looked intentional became a fun puzzle. It was a constant reminder that print design is equal parts creativity, problem solving, and accepting that the article length will never match the perfect spread you imagined.
