Front page of Travel section for La Mezcla.
We’ve been working with a whirlwind of Spanish the past couple of weeks. After much hard work, the files have been sent to the printer.
Santa Clara University professor Rose Marie Beebe, one of our favorite collaborators, asked us to put together a magazine-type publication of her Spanish class’s work from the fall semester. A total of thirteen students completed various works, including a travel essay, an advertisement, a book or movie review, a recipe, and a historical interview, to be included in the magazines.
We created two separate publications—La Mezcla and Nuevos Caminos. Within each publication, sections were divided by category. For example, the first section in both magazines is a travel section, as displayed above. Students provided photos to go along with what they wrote. Each section begins with a select photo or series of thumbnails and table of contents. The appearance of each section was unique, giving them a little different feel from one another while maintaining a consistent theme throughout.
A really fun portion of the work was designing the ads students had written. The things they were promoting were all very different and unique. This made playing with the layout a fun challenge. I’ll post an example later on.
No hablo español
I mentioned in a previous post the language barrier we faced. While working on this project was very fun and allowed us to get pretty creative, it was definitely a learning experience. I found it interesting that even though neither of us are fluent in Spanish, the layout and design process was not affected (besides changing the crucial hyphenation settings). It was amazing how little we needed to look up words or phrases.
El futuro
Sometime soon I hope to interview Rose Marie and get the inside scoop on the class. I’m sure she has some interesting facts about how she came up with the idea of the publication and what she hopes to accomplish by doing something of this sort for her students.