When you hear the term Boot Camp images of rough military training, heavy boots, drills in the mud, camouflaged faces, and, well, you get the picture. Tough training for tough people.

A Design Boot Camp is nothing like that, although some of the students going through it when they take my Multiplatform Design & Storytelling class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, often tell me that they had to sweat to get through those first assignments.

First is the key word here.

I teach a course with a heavy design component at one of the best known journalism schools in the globe. Our students are superb, highly motivated and destined to be the next generation of great storytellers. However, when they come into my class, they have little or no knowledge about design. They all have an eagerness to learn more about design, but confess that they have no background at all on design.

For my students, the Boot Camp and my course are their first experience/encounter with design in a formal setting.

That’s where the Design Boot Camp comes in. It is my way of providing the essentials of the craft of design starting at point zero. The Boot Camp is four weeks (class meets once a week). I divide the segment into what I call the four essentials of design: story structures, grids, typography and color palette. We now add the keys to good user experience as a fifth essential.

During the first four weeks, students do not create any original designs of their own. They concentrate on observing good design, exploring and identifying good story structures, grids, type use and color palettes that work.

Then they tackle their first design assignment. That’s what the students have just done, and I could not be more pleased with the results. I provided the students with two choices of stories: a news story (Trump discloses his plans for changes in infrastructure) and a feature story (Best cocktails of 2018). All they get is the text for the stories.

It is here that they apply what they have learned. They must be able to articulate their choice of story structure, grid, type and color.

Taking a look at the students’ work

Articulating design choices

One goal of my Design Boot Camp is to train a new generation of journalists who can articulate their design choices, even if they are not going to become designers themselves.

It is always wonderful to work with reporters and editors who understand and value design, and express their choices to those in charge of packaging and designing their stories.

However, now having taught my course at Columbia five years, I know that some students in the class get inspired to pursue careers in visual journalism as a result of what they learn in this class.

It is a visual world. Recently The New York Times suggested that we are entering the post-text era, with more videos and audio becoming the storytelling tools of choice. A more visual environment for storytellers and for our audience.

The Design Boot Camp was never more needed!

Society of News Design New York: Celebrating 40 years

The Society for News Design’s 40th Anniversary Workshop, Creative Conference and Awards Gala will be in New York City, March 22–24.

Workshop chair Tyson Evans, of The New York Times, and an army of volunteers are organizing three packed days of talks, training, networking and inspiration about the future (and past) of storytelling, visual journalism and news products across print and digital.

Speakers announced so far include Scott Stowell, proprietor of Open and winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design; Jennifer Daniel, of Google; John Maeda, of Automattic and visual journalists from The New York Times, Washington Post, Axios, Vice, ProPublica and more.

I am honored to be one of the speakers.

If you would like to attend what promises to be one of the best SND gatherings ever, please go here for more information:

https://nyc.snd.org