Newsstands have been attracting less and less attention in recent years. We live in an age when any information can be found online, watched on television or heard on the radio. However, the smell of a freshly printed newspaper cannot be replaced by a mouse or by a remote control. How can a publication attract readers’ attention and make them buy the newspaper? How can a newspaper become more attractive for the people of today and what are the secrets of a successful design? These and many other questions were answered by Angela Ivanesi, trainer of the course on Visual Journalism.

Within this course, SAJ students learned the basic rules of media design. Theoretical notions were combined with practical exercises performed individually or in groups. In the first days, future journalists learned everything about fonts and found out about the elements of a newspaper article (text body, title, author). Next, students learned about logos, their main principles and how the logos of various newspapers in the world evolved over years. Students worked individually on creating their own logo for a publication, and then trained to paginate a newspaper. Angela Ivanesi spoke about pagination in modules, about the role and placement of photos in a newspaper and about the creation of a unique and qualitative design of a publication. In the end, future journalists were divided into teams and worked on developing the concept of a four-page newspaper in A3 format.

The course culminated with one of the most interesting topics: Infographics. For two days, SAJ students learned to see the difference between infographics and other ways of rendering information, and the trainer explained how infographics can replace a boring text. To better understand how a thousand words can be replaced by an image, students produced their own infographics.

At the end of the course, SAJ student Stela Boico said that the activities performed during practical lessons proved to her that materials on a newspaper page cannot be arranged chaotically, but in a certain order, which should be pleasant and understandable for readers.

“Before the course, I thought that infographics are created with the help of websites, but the trainer showed us a new method for producing them,” Lia Ciutac said.

Visual Journalism was the last course in the first semester at the SAJ.

Photo source: Angela Ivanesi