- Maker: WRIT 5800 students, led by Bilal Amodu
- Genre: Literary journal
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5800: Editing, Layout, and Design
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2022
Digressions Literary and Art Journal is the official literary journal of NSU, publishing student work gathered and edited throughout the year by student staff and their faculty advisor, Dr. Mario D’Agostino. This year, as in past years, graduate students in the M.A. in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program, under the guidance of DCMA faculty member, Dr. Eric Mason, have lent their expertise by helping to layout the journal. While all students in WRIT 5800 in winter 2022 contributed in some way, Bilal Amodu took lead on this project and did the bulk of the work making sure the text was laid out correctly, and presented as well as possible the works within.
Reflection, by Bilal Amodu
I would like to begin this reflection by expressing my gratitude to Dr. Mason for his unrelenting guidance and support throughout this project. I decided to support his work on the Digressions layout as an opportunity to gain new skills and apply the principles of design in a context different from what I was previously accustomed. I began the process by reviewing the pieces that would be featured, familiarizing myself with Digressions’ goals and the design conventions employed in previous issues. I also communicated with Athena, the student director of the magazine, to better comprehend Digressions’ scope, focus and objectives. After reviewing the pieces and considering Digressions’ intention to feature different aspects of daily student life, I clustered each of the pieces into categories based on overarching themes I identified, such as visibility, loss, and falling in love. This thematic orientation therefore allowed me to envision how the different visual and written submissions may relate to one another, which inspired me to layout the submission as a spectrum of human experiences, which would open and close with the respective images of sunrise and sunset. One of the works that I chose to feature at the beginning, “You Wanted a Beach Day,” corresponded well with an image of the sunrise and was written by the student director herself, which did inspire an interesting conversation regarding the conventions of how to feature a student director who is simultaneously a contributing author. Fortunately, since the student director was graduating, Dr. Mason and Dr. D’Agostino, the magazine’s faculty advisor, felt that the decision would serve as a tribute to her time at the magazine, rather than a seemingly presumptuous decision.
I used the Adobe InDesign platform to organize the pieces, and with Dr. Mason’s modeling and guidance began to envision how I could use different styles and text formatting features to position the written submissions and images strategically. The most notable example of this was the layout of a play that had been submitted, which had presented challenges of how to represent different elements such as dialogue, character names and screen directions. With Dr. Mason’s help, I was able to create a different style for each of these elements, which did consume a significant amount of time yet hopefully allowed the play to follow the formatting conventions of its genre, such as the capitalization of character names and the presentation of stage directions in italics. This process did compel me to envision my work much more holistically, and therefore be more attentive to how smaller details such as text formatting contribute to a larger product, and how to integrate separate and often different components into a cohesive, unified whole. I truly appreciate the experience I gained contributing to this project and the abundant unwavering support I received from Dr. Mason who offered guidance on how to use InDesign and who worked on items I was unable to complete. I believe that this experience has improved my writing process and I am excited to pursue similar projects in the future.
