I really enjoyed this project; it felt very simple and took me back to basic graphic design skills that we had learned in J365. What I particularly enjoyed was the creative freedom we had with the conceptual design. I could have chosen to include actual pictures in Photoshop and change the pictures, or choose a classic “drawn” graphic. I had a lot of fun playing around in Illustrator to come up with my two visual elements that tied in to the story and gave the story another dimension. It was tedious to design because, although it is very simple-looking, there were a lot of different details that went into each graphic. The other detail that I had trouble with and had to play around with for a bit was the fact that the journalist story was really short and there was not much text to fill in white space. For this detail, I tried to play around with a minimalistic design, and then it also gave me another opportunity for a second graphic on my second spread. Looking through magazine examples before starting my project, I saw all these minimalistic, very simple designs and wanted to model mine off of that, partly because I liked the design but also because I figured it could speed up the design process if I was not putting too much on my pages. This is very deceiving. For me, holding true to this type of design style proved harder than it looked. I think because I was trying to put less on my pages, this may have been harder than a busy design because you have to make sure each of your elements is cohesive and working together, and everything has to be placed, particularly because if one detail is off, it will be very noticeable. Rather, if I were to model a more busy design, detail could get lost, and there is not as much pressure to make everything look exact. Overall, I enjoyed the process of designing this project and am proud of the end result. It challenged me to think more critically about design elements and how they interact with each other, and I learned a lot about balance and cohesion in design.