At the beginning of my college career, friends and family would always ask me why I chose the University of South Carolina.  Each time, my answer felt silly.  “It’s just so pretty.”  It wasn’t the academics or the culture, but the design of the buildings, the beauty of the Horseshoe and the color of the leaves in Fall.  When visiting, I truly thought it was the most beautiful place on earth.  While this isn’t everyone’s deciding factor for a college, it was mine. 

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Visual aesthetics have always fascinated me, although I never before referred to them with such a formal title.  I only recognized my infatuation with things like perfectly stacked can towers at Walmart or color-coded paint swatches at Sherwin Williams.  At UofSC, I explored the objective impact of this new concept I’ve always felt existed, which ironically validated my college decision.  Through my classroom experiences and internship with Raleigh Magazine, I learned that simple visual choices can completely transform a piece of journalism.

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In my Digital Media Art Fundamentals class (MART 210), I was first introduced to visual aesthetics as something people studied.  I learned how to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom, where I experimented with the visual appeal of matching certain shapes and colors in still images.  In my New Media Art class (MART 380), I furthered my studies by learning how to make moving images, or gifs, in Photoshop and how to create expert videos in Adobe Premier. 

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While my media arts classes focused on this concept heavily, it wasn’t discussed in my journalism courses.  I decided to attribute these learnings to my Magazine Article Writing class (JOUR 566), where I selected visual aesthetics in journalism to research for my semester-long project.  Using implicit connotative meaning I learned about in my media arts classes, I chose to study Time Magazine’s covers depicting Donald Trump.  In the attached artifact, “Time for a Closer Look,” I discovered the impact that images can have on people’s perceptions of political figures.  As highlighted in the document, I uncovered the connotative meanings in 30+ cover images of Trump used by Time Magazine and observed their impact on the emotions of consumers.  In my words, “Similar to how a marketing campaign slowly draws consumers in through repetitive images leading to brand identification, these negative connotation covers of Trump condition someone into a certain belief system through repetitive messages on a series of covers.”

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As a visual learner, I’ve always felt the impact colors and layouts have.  In the summer of 2019, this manifested in my internship with Raleigh Magazine, where my interest in magazine journalism sparked.  On my first day, the publisher handed me a roll of painter’s tape, an old ladder and 100 printed pages, and she asked me to hang the pages in order on the wall.  Once I finished, the staff gathered and stared at the pages for visual inconsistencies – a title too small, an awkward color shift, a left-aligned image that might look better centered.  All week, we pasted sticky notes to the wall, printing and reprinting pages until there was nothing left to critique. 

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This practice was exhilarating for me, combining my detail-oriented, pictorial inclinations with my passion for reformative storytelling.  In this role, I fell in love with the buzz of a newsroom and the celebration of creative thinking.  It is what made me want to write for magazines.

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I’ve applied this process of stringent visual aesthetics to my personal blog, rachyljones.com.  Firstly, I carefully curated my website to reflect my own personal brand.  In addition to publishing in an online format, I create magazine pages for each article using Adobe software techniques I learned in class.  The attached artifact, “Gone to Ghana,” is an example of an article I designed as it would appear in a magazine.  In these pages, I display my expertise in layout, color and visual appeal.  This article, along with others, has given my blog a unique identity in a web-driven world.