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Phoebe's Design Team Review

Hello everyone! My name is Phoebe Vodnik, I just finished my freshman year at NDSU so this was my first year on the Northern Eclecta staff. I was one of the members of the Design Team, along with Sadie, Anna, Caitlin, and Kylie. The design team, along with everyone else, has worked very hard to produce the 18th edition of Northern Eclecta, Metamorphosis. I just want to take this moment to highlight some of the amazing work these girls have done. Starting with all the behind-the-scenes business, the design team made all of the graphics I am sure you have seen just about everywhere. Fliers, social media graphics, and merch designs, were all created by the design team. Special shoutout to Anna for creating our main flier that was hung around the NDSU campus and the Fargo area. 


When it came to designing the journal, we first started by looking at the platform we would be using. In past years, Northern Eclecta has been using Adobe InDesign to create the journal, for anyone who is not familiar with InDesign, it is a platform that is almost impossible to use if you are not taught how to navigate it. For those of you who have used InDesign before, you know what I mean. With the majority of the former design team members having graduated, we were on our own. After a long process of watching YouTube tutorials and reading wiki-how articles, we decided to do some research on the platform Canva, which is what we use to make graphics, to see if it was capable of designing a journal at this level. Long story short, Canva was the direction we went. Canva allowed us to have multiple students working on Metamorphosis and made designing and duplicating pages much easier.


Once we finalized the decision that we were going to use Canva for the production of Metamorphosis, we then transitioned to deciding on how we wanted the journal to look. This part seemed fairly easy, after looking at our journals from the past and researching other high-end journals, we were all on the same page about making an eye-catching and colorful journal. Picking fonts, page layouts, and colors took us much longer than we expected. We juggled between things like Flamingo or Carnation pink, should the colors fade in or fade out, what should we bold, where should the page numbers go, and so on. Thanks to our team and our dedication to this journal, along with many late nights and extended class periods, we finally had an official page template. Special shoutout to Anna and Sadie, I'm not great with the color wheel, so I'm not sure I saw the difference between Carnation and Flamingo Pink, but they stepped up and put extra time outside of class to make sure every color was absolutely perfect. 


After all the major decision-making was over, we transitioned to putting all of your beautiful art and writing pieces into the journal. Thank you Kylie for allowing this step to be 10 times easier by making a spreadsheet with all the information we needed on it. This spreadsheet, along with my control F, C, and V keys, made it so much easier to find things and insert them into the journal. Although this step was fairly simple, it became quite a long process. I know Sadie and I spent a late Saturday night finalizing everything, putting it into the correct order, and fixing any flaws we noticed. After a 2 am bedtime, the journal was handed over to the editing team to be proofread, and man do they deserve a shoutout. They read our 180-page journal in a day and were able to fix many details that our eyes missed. We repeated this process many times, and after the course of four long, and I mean long, editing days, Metamorphosis was ready to be published.


We could not have done this without any of you; from the contributors, to the staff, to Jamee, to even just our support systems outside of class, this journal is a product of all of our efforts. Now, I’m almost done I swear, but I have one final thank-you to do. Thank you, Jamee for the endless support, great communication, and your willingness to hold us to a high standard, the 18th edition of Northern Eclecta could not have been produced without you. I, along with I’m sure everyone else who is involved in the journal, am looking forward to what the 19th edition of Northern Eclecta has in store. 


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