The Western Gazette is the student newspaper for Western University based out of London, Ontario. During my tenure the Gazette was Canada’s only daily student newspaper with an Editorial staff of roughly 25 people as well as dozens of volunteers. Established in 1906, the Gazette is rich with history and has a massive alumni base that includes sports writer and analyst Stephen Brunt, on-air personality and analyst for Hockey Night in Canada Elliott Friedman, and director of TIFF, Cameron Bailey. As the graphics editor at the Gazette, these were some of the special issues that I created designs for, for front-page covers as well as inside spreads that were seen throughout Western’s campus and online.
visit live site →Every year the Gazette publishes an ‘Elections Issue’, that showcases the campaigns for each side running for University Student Council. For February 2015, we wanted to go with a nostalgic spin on it. Our Editor-In-Chief came up with the suggestion for a Pokemon issue which I jumped at the chance to do completely, doing both the inside spread as well as the front cover.
We photographed each candidate and their teams and I edited them making them all red and blue to create the contrast between them for the cover.
While the cover was fun to do, the inside spread is where I really had my fun. I learned how to create 8-bit versions of all the candidates with Adobe Photoshop. I then painstakingly recreated the GameBoy colour Pokemon games as best I could and made it look like the candidates were Pokemon fighting each other. It was a pretty innovative issue and I really enjoyed working on it.
In September of 2014 we had a “Frosh Issue”, always our first issue of the year. Fantasy was the theme and wanted to create a sort of old arcane magic book. My friend Jillian who was a much more talented artist than me drew the sketch of the dragon and I edited it and refined it for the cover.
For another Frosh Issue, our Editor-In-Chief had a very specific vision: he wanted a scene where parents were dropping their kid off on the “Western Island” and sailing off into the sunset, thrilled. I got the idea to do a sort of faux-paint collage where I would take actual images, print them, paint them, and then scan them back in to the collage. You can see this on the palm tree and some of the water. In the end I created basically exactly what they asked for, you can even see the side-by-side comparison.
For the map, I got the idea instantly to create a Western-themed marauders map to show where hidden tunnels and paths are for students to venture to. All I did was find a high res map of western and manually trace each building in Adobe Illustrator. Then I added each tunnel, hidden pathway and different backgrounds and brushes to give it the look of an old, tattered map. It actually turned out to be quite a hit and I got a lot of positive feedback from it.
This fantasy Frosh Issue cover is one of my proudest designs. It probably had over 100 adjustment layers, mostly to get it just right for print. At this point I had been working in print for over 2 years and knew how tricky it was to get a dark cover to print exactly how you wanted it to since the blacks would usually all blend together.
The cover was acclaimed by the staff as well as many outsiders but it soon became infamous for a whole different reason. The issue itself featured an article titled “How to sleep with your TA”. Obviously this incited controversy and things only got worse when our Editor-in-Chief promptly took to Twitter to defend his and the writers actions and fight with internet trolls. Naturally this brought the paper quite a bit of media attention and sure enough, my cover graced every story that the Gazette was in. You can see some shots of the cover from local and national news sources here. They say any press is good press so I guess I’ll take what I can get.
For the Marauder’s Map, years later I ran into someone who said them and their friends all had the map cut out and hung on their residence walls. That was pretty cool to hear. Since it was my first real graphic for the paper I got to learn how to properly set bleeds, manually layout the pages (on actual paper with pencil!) and work with CMYK.
