Translating diverse institutional stories into cohesive, high-quality editorial design while balancing strict brand guidelines with selective creative freedom.
Award-winning publication recognized by IABC, PRSA, and AMA, serving as a high-visibility storytelling vehicle for the college's leadership and community.
C. T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston
Higher Education
Lead Graphic Designer
Ongoing, Biannual
Biannual, 100+ page print and digital publication
Inside Bauer Magazine had many moving parts and strict deadlines for production. All creative roles had to operate in processes that were shifting depending on context, tackling many tasks simultaneously or in quick succession to achieve the depth and richness the magazine was known for. A full symphony of writing stories, shooting photography and videography, laying design, broadcasting social media campaigns, and digitizing the magazine into its web version. We did this every semester!
I had the privilege of onboarding to the magazine crew as a supporting designer and then transitioning to lead designer.
In both my support role and my lead role, my decision-making and leadership focused on the magazine's feature stories where I had unrestricted creative freedom, independent of brand guidelines, to play with typography, color palettes, photography treatment, and layout. It was a joy to read the feature stories and meet with the people the stories were about so I could design a layout tailored to them. I chose typography that amplified the individual's personality, matched color palettes to photoshoot locations, and utilized creative photo editing techniques to enhance the beautiful photo assets.
When I shifted from my support role to lead, I became more embedded in the planning process and art direction for photo and video shoots. I not only continued to work on feature stories, I laid out every story of the magazine cover-to-cover and the covers too!
Inside Bauer Magazine was a recurring herculean effort of creative collaboration and expertise involving journalism, photography, videography, design, social media, web development, and print vendor coordination. As the Office of Communications, it was our job to tell the stories of the students, faculty, staff, and alumni at the college of business. Inside Bauer Magazine was one big way we accomplished that.
Semester-over-semester the process was similar, but agile enough to allow us to adapt to different contexts for each issue. We would source and write feature stories, source letters from the dean, gather key college metrics like scholarships and grant awards, plan and execute photoshoots and video shoots, lay digital design spreads, build web design layouts, post social media campaigns, and coordinate with print vendors to finalize a physical copy. We did this every semester with great success and even won awards for our work.
Inside Bauer Magazine was already established when I signed on and it was a joy to carry the torch in its success during the years I served as designer.
Not only was the magazine a beautiful story-telling piece, it also served to update the college's community and attract donors. It was a representation of both the college and the institution, and was a point of pride to all students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community partners who contributed to its success. It was something that couldn't be built without the many hands of the community; it was a project that belonged to all of us.
The magazine received multiple industry recognitions including:
I take a great pride in saying that two of the award-winning feature stories, Grateful Heart and The Wonderful Kind, were my designs that were independent of brand restriction.
My full collection of work from my time served on the creative crew for Inside Bauer Magazine includes 12 issues over 5 years.
It was an honor and a privilege to learn from journalists early on in my career how to tell a great, long-format story, especially in a world steeped in quick-consumption social media content. To set my sights on communicating instead of selling has propelled my work forward in a much stronger, evergreen way. The pieces that I designed still hold strong today, 10 years later, and have aged with grace and beauty.
For me there is incredible validation in having won awards for my unrestricted creative work. As cheesy as it sounds, graphic design really is my passion and has been since I was a child. These magazine issues and accompanying awards are evidence of my lifelong dedication to my craft; they are milestones along my career journey and evidence of my skills and talents in the field of design.
