Design
I hadn't considered myself a designer before last spring. I had always viewed design as a means to deliver words on a page—a secondary necessity, after the story itself—but I've come to appreciate the art of design. Now, the first thing I notice when I open a magazine or newspaper is the design—is there too much white space? Is the pull quote style good?
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Almost everything I know about design I taught myself, with the help of my advisor and my former executive editor, Rosangel Flores-Rubio. Learning how to use InDesign and features on SNO has helped me create The Little Hawk.
Print - Newspaper
Page 3: World Food Prize​
This year, I introduced a section for upcoming dates (sometimes labeled as News Briefs) in the News section of the print paper. Because much of our news focused on events that had already occurred, I wanted City High students to be aware of important information coming up.
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Page 10: I Hate Instagram​
This is the strangest, most ambitious, and most time consuming design I've created. Since my former opinion co-editor, Bella, wrote a column about Instagram, I wanted to shape the story into the Instagram logo. I succeeded...kind of? after many trials and tribulations.
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Recognition: Honorable Mention, 2025 IHSPA Newspaper One Page Design
Pages 4-5: Four Candidates Competing for Three Seats
Sometimes, we like to do a full page spread to highlight long, in-depth stories. In November, with the ICCSD School Board election coming up, I created this spread featuring Q&As from each school board candidate. I like how it turned out! it's easy to tell which interview is which candidate, since their headshots are featured above their section, and I was able to add a QR code with a link to the full interviews on the bottom right of the spread.
Front Page: Federal Shutdown Affects Students
I love a good front page! When designing, it's important to keep every box lined up with the grid. For this spread, I decided to have the dominant image be a pie chart with a bold statistic on it—I wanted it to catch a passerby's eye to intrigue them to read more.
Sometimes, the front page of The Little Hawk has multiple stories (or excerpts) in the dominant area, but I wanted to highlight the federal shutdown because I thought it was especially important given the current political climate.
Page 11:​ The Movies You Might've Missed
I really enjoyed creating this page. It features a graphic from our resident cinephile, Ben Haines, as well as four movies that he recommends. Since each ​review was a different length, I had white space at the bottom I needed to fill. I placed a roll of film in the white space—when in Rome, do as the Romans do (when designing a page with movie stuff, add movie stuff).
The other thing I like about this design is how modern it looks compared to the majority of the newspaper. Instead of using Adobe Garamond Pro for the movie titles, I used Filicudi—an all caps sans serif font. I love the chunckiness that it adds, and the lines between each column brings the design to life.
Print - Magazine
Magazine Cover and Pages 4-7: Brain Drain
This is a simple 4-page design for my feature story Brain Drain. It features a graphic I designed—literally, a brain draining—a graphic visualizing where students want to go, quote bubbles with student quotes, and a pie chart with data from a poll. I used Canva to design the graphics.
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The magazine cover for the issue features my brain drain art and was designed with Tai Caputo.​
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Recognition:
Honorable Mention, NSPA Newsmagazine Cover of the Year
Second Place, IHSPA News Magazine Multiple Page Design
Second Place, IHSPA Magazine One Page Design
Magazine Cover and Pages 4-9: The Battle for the Phones
This 6-page spread features pull quotes from the story with a bold style, graphics with student thoughts, a pie chart stylized within a phone, and a dominant photo featuring students on their phones to represent student phone "addiction." I opted out of captions for the photo—instead of being distinctly separate from the rest of the story, I wanted it to blend in.
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The magazine cover for the issue features a photo I took and was designed with Yomi Hemley.
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Recognition:
Honorable Mention, 2025 NSPA Newsmagazine cover
Honorable Mention, 2025 IHSPA Magazine One Page Design
Pages 10-11: Good Morning, City High​
This is a spread that will be published in the next issue of The Little Hawk Feature Magazine. I wanted to capture a retro feel for the GMCH anchors, so I used a graffiti-like font that reminded me of 90's style billboards. ​
This design, as opposed to many of my previous ones, heavily features photos. I wanted the reader's eye to be drawn to the experience of making a news show from behind the camera, instead of on the other side of a screen.
Web
The web design for this article includes similar graphics as those included in my print design, but also adds pull quotes made using the SNO pull quote feature and additional graphics. I wanted to do a clear, clean design—my Battle For the Phones web design, which I made a few months earlier, was more design-heavy but I thought it was too busy and distracted from the content.
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Recognition:
First place, 2025 IHSPA Single Web Story Design
This is a simple, clean design that I consider to be more "serious." Two out of three of the graphics featured within the story are charts with important data, and the other graphic is a drawing I made that visualizes the idea of being "targeted"—West High School and Liberty High School are both on the second ring of the target, where as City High is on the third, representing the rank each school is given. I really wanted to lean into the "targeted" visualization, so along with the inline target art, the main photo is a drawing of City High with a target in front of it.
I used ​Canva to design section headings (stories from iccsd students, policy plans, etc.) and for each individual graphic. This was my first try at really customizing a web story—I had seen some cool designs from other student publications and wanted to try my hand at it. As I was teaching myself how to use the SNO web design functions, I learned that the program is incredibly customizable. The Battle for the Phones served as a great introduction to the different features that the SNO Design Templates have to offer.
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Recognition:
Third place, 2025 IHSPA Single Web Story Design
Social Media
8 Dumb Bills, Targeted, Brain Drain
I wanted our Instagram followers to be able to easily digest some of my longer work—like Brain Drain and Targeted—on their feed. To do this, I made social media posts that started with an eye catching, dominant image, and had more information on each of the subsequent slides. My hope was that people would see the posts, become interested, and read the whole story on thelittlehawk.com.
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Recognition:
Fifth Place, 2025 NSPA Social Media Promotion
(Not all were featured, and our portfolio included other posts too)