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September 1, 2017October 21, 2021

Greenlee School Website Redesign

The summer before I left the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, my supervisor and I, with additional help from the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, worked to redesign the Greenlee School’s website. This transition was made to transition the site from Drupal to WordPress, which the College also used, in order to streamline the school’s content and posting capability.

This was a very involved process, which included focus groups with the website’s primary users (students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni), many brainstorming sessions and a moving a lot of content. In the end, all of our work led to the creation of two separate sites, one for the school’s general audiences and another specifically for Greenlee School alumni.

While the project wasn’t completed and implemented before I left in August 2016, the bulk of the work — streamlining, moving and classifying existing content, determining necessary pages and classifications — had been done. My supervisor, who remained at the Greenlee School after I left, saw this website overhaul through to completion in the summer of 2017. The delay was due to many factors, including a backlog in technical assistance, the departure of the school’s director, and the hiring of my replacement at the school.

September 1, 2017

2016 Greenlee Glimpse

The 2016 Greenlee Glimpse was the final project I took on for the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication. As I transitioned out of my position as the school’s communication specialist, I was fortunate enough to be able to take on the project as an independent contractor. In this capacity I was able to work remotely as the editor of the third alumni magazine I created for the school as I traveled across the west coast in the fall of 2016.

Working on the magazine while traveling couldn’t have worked out better. While internet connectivity proved challenging to find at times, I was able to visit and interview one of the school’s alumni who lives and works in Los Angeles and was named as one of Forbes’ 40 Under 40 in Advertising and Marketing in 2016. This feature story ended up being the cover story, using images that I captured during my interview with Stafford.

As usual, I worked with Greenlee professor Deb Gibson and her feature writing students, who contributed content for the Glimpse. This year I again chose to design the publication myself and felt comfortable taking more risks with some design elements in the magazine, which I believe turned out well and made the magazine more visually appealing.

I wrote two of the feature stories for the 2016 Glimpse, which was a great exercise for me while traveling. Conducting interviews, crafting narratives and acquiring artwork for these stories kept my mind active while I was exploring the western United States. My feature stories on Greenlee alumnus Tyler Stafford and outgoing Greenlee School Director Dr. Michael Bugeja are below.

July 13, 2016February 2, 2017

Professional Media Internship Brochure

Cover — Greenlee School 499 brochure cover

This project was a long time in the making — almost a year, to be exact. When I was first tasked with creating a brochure about the Greenlee School’s required 400-hour internship program the school was in the midst of updating its curriculum.

If you know anything about the wonders of bureaucracy, you know that promptness is not one of them, especially in higher education. Once I had an initial draft of the copy and design mocked up this project got put on the backburner until the catalog changes made it through the school’s curriculum committee and were approved by the university.

Fast forward through two busy semesters and that finally happened! To be honest, when I finally got back to this brochure this summer I was glad to have sat on it for a while. After some time, I was able to come at it with a new perspective and am really proud of the finally product that I put together.

It’s really easy for brochures to become messy with too much information, but I worked to pare down the information to keep it simplistic and clean and ensure it didn’t repeat info provided in other materials that students would likely already have seen. It was great to be able to use a lot of images my team and I took over the last two years in this project, which the Greenlee School should be able to use for quite some time.