What is special about the work on our school newspaper is that the end product is the result of a collaboration between two elective courses, each of which takes place for two hours in the afternoon. For a team alone, creating an output of the idea would be too much. The elective “Journalistic Writing” is responsible for the editorial part. There, ideas for the articles are collected in categories and texts are written. All finished articles are passed on to the “Layout” elective course. There are usually schoolchildren who are less interested in writing, but want to live out their creativity in visual design and some can also imagine working in this field later.
The editors of “The Idea” are rewarded with first place in the papermaker’s competition. The newspaper has been published at the Maria Ward secondary school in Mindelheim for 40 years.
(Photo: Robert Haas/Robert Haas)
The editors take care of the variety of content of the texts and collect the corresponding photos. The layout team then ensures that the whole thing is visually appealing – a clear separation, as in many large newspaper publishers. Fortunately, to shape the idea, we have the licenses of professional programs at our disposal, which offer almost unlimited possibilities, although handling them can be quite challenging. Our school board, the Schulwerk der Augsburg diocese, pays for these licenses. If you are looking for a free solution for Photoshop, for example, you could use the Gimp program. You can also design a layout in MS Publisher or Word instead of in Adobe Creative Suite. This is a bit more cumbersome, but doable.
We edit photos or our own drawings in Photoshop. In our layout team there are always very talented draftsmen who can handle the pen as confidently as they can with the mouse. Annika Sirch, for example, illustrated a detective story and her own article about the “Bullet Journal” on paper. The layout team then scanned the images and edited the contrasts and white balance slightly in Photoshop. In recent years, people have been drawing more and more digitally. All students at our secondary school have a tablet, which can also be used to load the relevant drawing apps. For example, Valeria Josipovic implemented our last year’s cover image digitally (see above). The Mindelheim town hall in the background was drawn on the basis of a photograph; one level above is the freehand drawing of the three boys, who are standing with their backs to the viewer. Julia Kreipl’s “Fresh Air” illustration (left) is an excellent example of what can be achieved with digital drawing apps.
The editors have a lot of freedom, but basic rules such as text printing in two columns must be observed.
(Photo: SZ/school newspaper “The Idea”)
Finally, in Adobe InDesign, headings, images and texts are put together in such a way that the output is ready for printing at the end. The layout team has a lot of freedom when designing the individual pages. But so that our school newspaper doesn’t look like a thrown together heap of creative design ideas, the layout artists have to stick to some design principles that are traditional here and give our school newspaper a recognition value. These include the header, uniform margins, a predefined font and font size for the body text, and text printing in two columns.
So that the visual design does not become too monotonous, the layout designers can and should sometimes deviate from these rules. Experimentation often results in unconventional sides, which are ultimately the icing on the cake. An example of this is the page “Goodbye, Mrs. Knight”, on which the text, children’s pictures and curriculum vitae of our former headmistress were set differently from the basic structure. Apart from the header, the double page “Rainforest” (left) is completely free.
It’s often difficult to arrange text and images in a way that makes the whole thing look visually appealing while still fitting into the final product. This requires a great deal of creative flair and the layout designers have to master the programs. More complex articles are therefore only designed by experienced students who have already taken part in the elective course for several years. Anyone who is there for the first time usually has to learn the basics of the design programs first and, after a theoretical crash course, try out smaller projects first. Book presentations, photo pages or the design of simple puzzles are suitable for this.
Normally, some articles that were created at the end of the previous school year can already be set at the beginning of the school year. In the first half of the school year there is a lot of editorial activity because the layout elective course needs at least three months after the editorial deadline for the respective issue to make the respective issue ready for printing. Most articles are therefore usually editorially finished in February, and articles for next year’s edition are often already being written in the second half of the year. But then the critical phase begins for the layout team: The first draft of the current issue should be completed by the end of April so that there is still enough time for troubleshooting before the school newspaper is printed in the Pentecost holidays. In the last few weeks of school, we then take care of the sale, including meeting the deadline for the school newspaper competition.
The idea has been appearing at the Maria Ward secondary school in Mindelheim for 40 years. Teacher Florian Schomanek takes care of the editing, colleague Sybille Gerner takes care of the design with the elective layout course.