Design
Magazine spreads
Designer of the Year Portfolio 2025 Personal Statement:
Birthday cards, thank you cards, and holiday cards, each uniquely created by me. Always signed: “Lots of love, Kiana.” Ever since I could remember, I felt a thrill in having the responsibility of creating handmade cards to celebrate special occasions for those I cared about. Cards were my specialty. To me, it was more than just a piece of paper with a couple of words or a cheesy phrase. Cards was a way to commemorate and give back to the receiver and show appreciation, adding elements that both embellished and created a more personalized touch to the card, taking a card from something simple to something heartfelt.
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Growing up, I always thought of design as just expressing myself and my creativity in the things I drew and the crafts I created. I would stay up late at night finishing projects and presentations, cutting and gluing different colored cardstocks, spacing the letters just right, using each one of my 48 sparkle-gel pens to highlight words and create striking titles in hopes of grabbing my teacher’s attention. I didn’t know it then, but I was developing my eye for detail, layout, and design overall.
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Now, design has become a visual medium beyond just a hobby of mine; a way to visually express and complement the writing that comes with it, whether that is my own in my news articles or someone else’s in our school’s newsmagazine. As both a creator and reader, I’ve grown to learn the importance of visualizing stories, data, and emotions. There’s something special about taking different elements and being able to piece together like a puzzle, with the final version being a masterpiece you can appreciate, full of small details that reveal themselves the longer you look at the spread.
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With each new issue, I’ve collected more and more tips and tricks capable of creating feelings beyond just the writing. I’ve adjusted text sizes to guide readers’ eyes, use colors to carry themes, and spacing elements to allow for the design to breathe and speak for itself. I’ve grown to learn that most often, simplicity stands out the most. Good design shouldn’t need to be crowded, but rather have the feeling that each component placed was true and intentional.
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One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is that creating an exceptional spread takes time. I remember one spread that I thought would be finished in a week when it really took two more and around 10 more versions. But, there really are no shortcuts to thoughtful designs. Even though it can be slow and sometimes frustrating, I’ve grown to love that process because of the rewarding end and effective layout. And through this, one of the greatest things I’ve gotten to do was also helping others learn the same things. This year, I was able to guide two interns in learning the fundamentals of creating great designs, and I think it has both helped them and allowed me to really pinpoint the things that work best in different situations, really showing how far I’ve come since my first design and how much I can adapt, overcome, and succeed.
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I design with ambition. Not the ambition just to make something look good, but to make it something that feels right and can be appreciated by both readers and the writers and designers too. Good design is not just a backdrop, but an active part of the story, there to connect readers from text to visualization. It’s capable of conveying emotion and meaning, something memorable that people can actually care about. It creates something that doesn’t just inform but also echoes and resonates with readers. And that’s what I want most from my designs.
1. Shooting her shot: As my first ever produced magazine layout, I really wanted the photos of the subject to stand out. However, with a limited number of photos, the layout itself became a big challenge. I played around with different shapes and cutout styles with the goal of using a white shadow to contrast the darkness of her uniform. In the end, I added a subtle gradient of light coming from behind her to also spotlight her movement on the ice. Color selection was also an important part of this piece, taking the teal of her uniform and using it as the background color to continue uniformity between both the photos and the spread itself. Furthermore, because she was on the ice, I introduced the soft light blue curve on the second page in order to mimic the fluid movement of ice skating.
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2. Touchdowns & traditions: Throughout our entire production process, including student and reader input, was our top goal. When I took the role of editor for the entertainment section in Issue 3 of our school’s newsmagazine, the Highlander, I was determined to include some sort of visual representation of a data poll that we had conducted. I also used visuals of the football and goalpost to both create unity within the spread while adding thematic colors that would stand out, along with the varsity font in the title. Lastly, to continue the football theme, I used a background of a sports field. However, because the original picture was a little bright, I used a green background with a lower opacity to mellow out the colors, but still be able to retain the same playful qualities of the original picture while making the page more readable and cohesive.
3. Pho-fillment: Pho is something that is warm and comforting. These are the exact qualities that I wanted to evoke in readers when looking at this spread. I focused on keeping the design minimalistic while using deep yellow and red to tie into the historical roots of pho in Vietnamese culture. In this spread, I also explored the shadow effect in Adobe InDesign in order to accurately replicate the ambient lighting of the restaurant. By intentionally leaving open blank space, I really wanted to capture the nostalgic goodness of pho and be able to highlight the crisp outlines of my photos and create clean, legible text boxes. This really allowed me to continue the simplicity and authenticity of the pho and highlight the story itself.
4. CMONT votes on the Grammys: “How can we encourage more student participation within our magazine?” That’s what I asked myself throughout the whole process of this one spread. We had decided on a poll with multiple questions to see what different Grammy awards students predicted to win this year, and I knew that I wanted the layout to include a constituent color theme and overall fluid feeling of the design, but I also really wanted to use different design elements to highlight each of the different titles won in the poll. I also focused on emphasizing the numbers or titles of albums and songs in order to still allow for readers to understand the importance of each graphic.
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5. Tying the threads: As my first big multi-spread layout design, I really wanted to work on cohesiveness by using the same color palette and texts throughout the different pages. I was able to highlight the main human-focused theme by using cutouts, such as a magnifying glass or removing half of the background to draw focus on the subjects. In connection with the main story, I focused on maintaining a more personal touch from story to reader by incorporating the different familiar faces and visuals that could easily be understood by the audience and actually allow them to become invested in the story and encourage appreciation for the subject’s community work.
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Tying the Threads:
This was my first multi-page spread, spanning over seven pages. In this spread, in particular, I focused on highlighting the activities that my subject often has to repeat daily. I really wanted to capture an accurate representation, however I also wanted it to feel engaging and feel memorable to readers and allow they to experience the same tasks and connections that cops and detectives make.
Touchdowns & Traditions:
In this spread, I wanted to incorporate student input into the magazines so we used a poll and added a visual infographic of the data we collected. This way, it adds relatableness to our readers and they can see if other people agreed with their decisions.
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Pho-fillment:
Pho is something that is warm and comforting, and that is the feeling I wanted to give to readers in this spread. I focused on keeping the design simple while using yellow and red to tie into the Vietnamese history of pho. In this spread, I also played around with the shadow effect in Adobe InDesign in order to accurately portray the authentic lighting inside the restaurant.
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CMONT votes on the Grammys:
As a fun way to include student views, I took a poll with various questions and created an infographic to display the information visually. Some things that I focused on in this spread were the use of multiple font sizes to express importance while also keeping a similar theme throughout the one-pager through similar colors and fonts.
Heart Cookies:
Following our recipes in issues 1 and 2, I kept with the same design, only adjusting the colors and title font of the spread. For example, the colors pink and red embodied the Valentine's Day theme. Furthermore, the repetition of hearts within the spread created cohesion and warmth.
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Holidays of heritage:
This spread in particular is one of my favorites because of the artwork that my friend, Shiyo, created for it. In this spread it talks about heritage so I really wanted to capture the feeling of comfort and happiness through things that people could relate to.
Shooting her shot:
In this spread, I played with wrapping text around my main subject as well as color picking from the blue on her uniform to use as my background color and accent color. This was my first spread using photos with captions.
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Sophomore Year
Minor Concerns:
I created this spread when I was a magazine editor intern during my Sophomore Year. In this spread, I learned how to use Photoshop and transparency to obtain the effect of words as the model's top.
Blinded by Deception:
This was my first spread that I created using Adobe InDesign. In this spread I learned the basics of color distribution as well as cohesiveness in my elements and managing crowding of text. I focussed on drawing my readers eyes to different spots of my spread.