MEDIUM: InDesign & PhotoShop

In June 2024, I was hired by Daniel Gellasch, who was the Director for the Ethics Outreach and Programming for the University of Baltimore’s Hoffbereger Center Ethical Engagement. As the Administrative Publishing Design Lead and student for the Internship class (DESN 775) I have to digitally create the third edition of Pro Tanto. Pro Tanto is an academic journal created for the Hoffberger Center Student Fellows Program. The Student Fellows are undergraduates who use the journal to share their articles on philosophy, law, and ethics. Every fall, a new journal edition is released with its theme. My role was to design the cover and the pages of the academic journal. This journal intends to reel in specific audiences. It will be attached online on the Hoffberger Center page as an interactive PDF and printable. What is essential is that the journal should be accessible for everyone to read, including a person with low vision. I followed the ADA guidelines based on color contrast and color blindness.

The journal is intended to be seen by users who frequently scroll through the University of Baltimore site, especially new students. First-year students interested in studying Philosophy, Law, and Ethics and students interested in joining the Student Fellows Program can scroll through the journal and get an idea of how the ethics program will run. The journal will be formatted and refined for viewers who are job recruiters. Giving the journal a scholarly look can make the decision-making of the recruiters easier for the student fellows to be chosen for job positions.

This academic journal aims to provide student fellows with the opportunity to investigate and discuss their scholarly ideas with the reader. The Student Fellows spend their whole semester tailoring their research to their academic experience. They use their disciplinary and real-life experiences to assemble their understanding of ethics and philosophy in the real world. They also had to correspond their articles based on the theme the Research Fellow gave them. The purpose of digitally designing the journal is to match the theme and the tone of all of the student fellow's articles. The journal's design must be neutral, simple, and striking toward a viewer's perspective. The journal's style should be moderate and focus significantly on the student fellow's article.

For this edition, InDesign is the best program to start an academic journal, mainly since the program is used to design books and pamphlets. Before starting the journal, I looked up more information about the Hoffberger Center and its history. Mr. Gelleasch then required me to design pages and placeholders for the third edition of Pro Tanto. I used InDesign to create pages and draft placeholders where I placed the images, body texts, title, and the Center's logo. I developed the placeholders for the Directors Page, Student Fellows Page, Table of Contents, Staff Page, chapter pages, and biography pages. After I sent the mock-up placeholders to Mr. Gelleasch for review, I created three different journal styles based on this edition's theme, "Praise and Blame." For the fonts, I used a method that I did in a typography class back in community college called "Type Trials." I used this method to look for 36 types of fonts for the journal title, 14 subtitle fonts, and four body text fonts for the articles. I ensured these fonts were in the public domain and from Adobe and Google. I used font generators like FontJoy to reduce the number of fonts used to generate a match for these fonts. Then, I used ChatGPT to declare which fonts are suitable for the journal, separating them into three font styles — title, subtitle, and body type —which closely should match the theme for this edition.

For colors, I looked through other existing article journals, and they used neutral or pastel colors. The critical appearance of academic journals is not to be radiant and distracting but to appeal to the viewers. Once again, I asked ChatGPT to show 20 different neutral or pastel colors that match the "praise" theme first, then the "blame" theme. Surprisingly, ChatGPT pulled up "praise" theme colors, which came out very bright, and the "blame" theme has a small number of bright colors but mostly darker colors. I spent a few days on Adobe Color, using their accessibility tool to check the background and text colors to see which passed the WCAG Accessibility criteria and grouping those colors by color blind safety. Doing the contrast checker helps reduce the number of colors sorted into three drafted styles.

I also added minimal lines, styles, and shapes to make the look of journal drafts interesting. I used the ruler and guides for the journal to measure the spacing needed to add more assets. I use the character/paragraph rule and parent pages to set up the rule of page numbers and font formatting so I did not have to manually build the assets for each page. I created a pyramid shape to stack the staff images to accommodate the Hoffberger logo and title spacing. I used Photoshop to remove the background behind the student fellows since I only needed their bodies inserted in a framed background on InDesign. I used Adobe Firefly, DALL-E from Microsoft Bing and Google Images to avoid getting copyrighted images online. Sadly, the book design does not meet the standards for the Hoffberger Center and I ended up using it for my portfolio and later expand it as a mock-up of what it will look like as an open book.

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