The modern reader is increasingly drawn to the online media, where information is quick and, in most cases, free. However, there is still a faithful audience to the written press, for which the smell of the freshly printed newspaper can not be replaced by any gadget. How do we make attractive media products for both categories of consumers? The answer to this and other questions the SAJ students found out at the Media Design course delivered by Angela Ivanesi.

To start with, the young people learned about creating, positioning and setting up the main elements of a newspaper: format, font, title, body text, body letter, image, graphics, and so on. Then, the students learned how to create an original and attractive logo, which are the “secrets” of the logo to capture the reader’s attention and how the logos of the world’s most famous publications have evolved over the years. The trainer also spoke about paging modules, the role and position of photos in a newspaper, the quality and the originality of a publication’s design.

The information was assimilated in practical activities. So, after having acquired working skills in Adobe InDesign and Adobe Illustrator, the students, like true designers, created a logo on their own; then, working in groups, they elaborated the concept of a newspaper, and built the layout of their own publication.

And because, as in many other fields, the boundaries between journalistic genres are quite conventional today, the next theme of the course was about infographics and their role – in printed press, on a website or on TV. De facto, Angela Ivanesi explained how a seemingly boring text can be “saved” or even replaced by a dynamic infographic. In order to better understand the importance of visual images capable of transmitting more than a thousand words, the students made their own infographics.

The last day of the course was devoted to web pages. The future journalists were initiated in the WordPress platform. They have tested how a web page works, how to create pages and menus, how to publish a news story on the platform, how to insert pictures and videos and, of course, how to change design elements.

At the end of the course, the students said that practical activities had helped them a lot to understand that in the age of the image, the success of a publication depends not only on its content but also on the design, the pleasant and intelligible arrangement of texts and graphic elements on pages. The Media Design course was the first in the second semester at the SAJ.