Label

When I was at primary school I jumped on the ‘school magazine’ bandwagon, though sooner rather than later. Multiple A3 photocopies folded together into a crude black-and-white publication, and sold to a queue of supportive/sympathetic parents in the assembly hall before lessons began. We raised a small amount of money for the school, and in so doing they didn’t dictate the content, so I suppose what we did was entrepreneurial (I still remember haggling on the sale price with the headmistress). To the best of my recollection, my project – imaginatively titled ‘School Mag’ – had the longest run of all… two issues; it was the end of year six that curtailed operations. To speed things along, the wise thing would have been not to insist on doing the whole thing myself, and share some of the responsibilities. The lessons of life.

Roll forward twelve years and I am part of an all-together more sophisticated and slicker operation: working on Label magazine’s design team. Label is a free fortnightly magazine produced by Loughborough Students Media. The design team, of which I am part, is responsible for coalescing text and graphics. We read the content in advance and request photographs and illustrations from the section heads, or else source them ourselves. Then, over two evenings we design the section we have been allocated, which changes from week to week. Into the early hours of a Wednesday morning the editors and section heads edit and package everything together so that by Friday the magazine is printed and Loughborough students can read what’s going on in their dining halls and flats.

You can view back issues of Label from this year online here, but here are some my favourite spreads that I have designed (I also designed the Sports logo because previously we didn’t have one).