THE SOUNDING BOARD
Take it to the press!
“We had a product. It had to go out every two weeks. I made that happen, and made it look good too.”
The Sounding Board was my first serious job. When I was a Junior I started my first year with the campus paper. To get into the newsteam I had run a few trials with the paper’s original design, and when I took at the look what had produced according to the original style, something just felt off. So, I redesigned the paper from scratch, taking into consideration some of the lessons from other papers out there in the world. I looked at the function of a newspaper, the modularity required by the columns, the denseness of the medium, and fell in love with the challenge of layout design. Each week with the team brought fresh challenges: stories varied in length, pictures came in with odd crops or wild aspect ratios, sometimes I would have to edit for writing clarity, even. In the end, though, we had a product. It had to go out every two weeks. I made that happen on time, and I made it look good.
My secret sauce was the style guide I drafted. It worked out so well that even to this day, Grace College prints new editions of The Sounding Board using the Style Guide I drafted in 2018. That’s an 8 year vintage! My time with the Sounding Board brought a lot of experience, but my two main takeaways were to document all transferrable information and to set oneself up for success with a great style.
If you’ve read this long, I have a treat for you: more reading! The style guide I left is down below. Cheers!
