The modern reader becomes increasingly attracted to online media, where information is both faster and – most often – free. However, there are still people nostalgic for print media, who keep buying and reading traditional newspapers. How can one maintain the attention of such media consumers? How can a newspaper or magazine be made more attractive? And how can a newspaper’s design be adapted to new media trends, such as very popular lately inforgraphics? Answers to these and other questions SAJ students learned from Angela Ivanesi, trainer of the Visual Journalism course.

The course is designed to acquaint the School’s students with basic skills and knowledge to create and arrange the main elements of a newspaper on the page: format, font, headline, image, graphics and text. Young people learned how to draw the reader’s attention by using various graphic elements, what a logo is, and what principles its creation is based on. All theoretical knowledge was certainly applied in practical exercises. Like real designers, each student created a logo and made a newspaper page layout. All work was done in Adobe InDesign.

The last and most interesting topic was “Infographics and how to make them”. For two days, students learned what inforgraphics are and how they differ from other ways of conveying information, and Angela Ivanesi explained how a newspaper text can be replaced by an infographic.

SAJ students say that the practical knowledge obtained during the course will be of much help, even if not all of them are planning to work in print media. Dumitrita Andriuta is convinced that every journalist should know the basics of media design: “Now I know the secret of a logo and how to make it more interesting and attractive. Most of all, though, I liked designing a newspaper layout. I thought it is difficult, but I was wrong,” the student said.

Tomorrow, the School of Advanced Journalism starts the course of Online Journalism.