Vortex
PUBLICATION
Vortex is a creative literary and art journal celebrating student works through 114 pages of student submitted works. This Scottsdale Community College produced publication features writings of creative non-fiction, poetry, screenplays and short stories; Art featuring photography, computer graphics, fine arts and sculptures; and Native Vision and Voices, a section dedicated to Native American students that Attend SCC.
RE BRANDING
In 2022 The Vortex founder stepped down and retired from Scottsdale Community College leaving the publication in limbo. Another faculty member in the English department saw an opportunity to take up the torch and with the partnership of the head of the Visual Communication Department, The Vortex was reborn with the goal of creating something entirely new. Myself and another classmate had the opportunity to re-brand Vortex from its very conception and transform how students are celebrated moving forward. One of the first challenges we were met with was the layout. We took everything we knew about the previous publications and put our design experience to work creating a brand new layout to submit for approval.
TIMELINE AND CHALLENGES
Due to this publication being a student lead project, myself and my classmate had 14 weeks to create a new logo, refresh and implement a new layout for the publication through font pairings and utilizing new column and grid structure, promote Vortex, collect student submissions, select winners, create the file, make it print ready and release the final product by the end of the semester. One of the most challenging portions of this was collecting and handling the hundreds of student submissions we received and making sure that the 32 selected winners could all be featured properly in the publication. Due to the budget we were given for this publication, we had to ensure that everything would fit within 114 pages. Our initial file was 196 pages so we spent 3 hours sitting down making adjustments to font size, leading, and margin spacing to condense the publication down to the correct page size. We were successful in doing so and didn’t have to cut out any student works.
PRINT AND FINAL PRODUCT
The Vortex 6x8.5in finish size allowed us to print in a book block on a 13x19in parent sheet. This helped us save a considerable amount of paper as we could produce 4 full books through one full run. The goal was to produce 400 books and we were able to produce 420 due to the extra make ready paper.
ONLINE COPY
Check out the full online version HERE.