SND 45 Q&A: Print Individual Portfolio winner: Josh Jones

With SND 45 in the books, board member Martina Ibáñez-Baldor set out to ask this year's winners about their portfolios and tips for the rest of us. Josh Jones, Design Director at The Minnesota Star Tribune, won a Silver print award for individual portfolio in the SND 45 print competition.

What is your current job title, and how long have you been in that role?
I've recently accepted the new role of Design Director at the Star Tribune. I've been the Lead News Designer for the past five years and I'm just shy of my 10 years mark at the Star Tribune. I started as a student designer through a course at the University of Minnesota that places students in local newsrooms.

What do you love about designing for print?
The scale of broadsheet and what you can do with that scale has always fascinated me. I think many of our first lessons in broadsheet are when and how to be loud: When a headline needs to screams and when a photo needs to span every corner of the page. The harder lessons in print is when and how to be subtle and smart: How you can whisper with teeny-tiny type and how extra space creates relationships between everything. You get this large canvas to work with. Online design can tell stories in ways print can't, but one of the things it can't do is scale.

I often think about the print reader. These are people who are still paying a premium subscription for a physical and curated paper. They are our most loyal readers. They come to us for snapshot of their local and global communities, a calm daily routine outside of the river of push notifications. The best thing you can do with this reader loyalty is lean in. Tell stories that need more than a headline to unpack. Surprise them in your presentation. Use new and unconventional ways to explain the news and world. Print readers are asking for a product to immerse themselves in, so give them something to stare at.

Which of these projects was the most challenging?
Our story about Heather Mayer was emotionally draining. Heather was a mother, a daughter and a leader in the Twin Cities BDSM community. She became involved with a man named Ehsan Karam and died in the house where they lived. The police had a brief investigation and called Heather's hanging death a suicide, but her mother believed there was more to it. As she set out to find the truth, more woman came forward with allegations of assault by Ehsan.

This story is hard to read but important to tell. Reporter Andy Mannix and photographer Renée Jones Schneider had spent over a year working on the story when Anna Boone and I were brought on for online and print design. Before seeing any visuals I read the latest draft and thought: How do I get out of the way of this story? How can I support it and not distract from it? Then came the gobs of documentation: Police reports, court filings, text exchanges, journal entries, etc.

Those early weeks of being immersed in jarring images and exchanges was really tough. There was a weight on me that I hadn't experienced before in my career. With those emotions, you still have to approach it all as a journalist and storyteller. You have to ask yourself the same questions: What is essential to the story? What reinforces the story?

There was a moment I came back to during our coverage of George Floyd's murder when we had the image of the officer that killed him kneeling on his neck. We had long discussions about whether to publish that image. What was the news value? What harm does this create to our community, especially our Black community? We never published the image and part of the reason was we could clearly describe the moment in words. Yes, a photo can be the powerful thing that perfectly visualizes the story, but in this case it can also be something disturbing to readers and can re-traumatize survivors. That was a guiding light for the Heather's story: Do we need to show the jarring image, or can we accurately and effectively describe this part of the story through reporting?

What do you feel is the most important part of your design process?
Feedback with my team. You always get better results when you throw an idea around and see what's working and what isn't.

Find your people. You need people that listen to your ideas and make them better, but also people that you listen to when they tell you the idea isn't as great as you think it is.

What is your favorite piece in your portfolio from this year?
The year of the pickle was a bright spot for my year. I spend so much of my time with hard news, so moments where I can be silly and exercise a different creative muscle is worth a lot to me. It's not a stunning masterpiece, but it made people smile and giggle.

What advice would you give to designers who are looking to improve their portfolios?
Iterate as much as time allows. Try the crazy idea and trust your people when tell you when it's good crazy and when it's crazy crazy.

Continue to look at other designer's work and try an approach that they make look easy. Remember that everyone has a first time at everything and it takes little steps every day to build skills.

Work on advocating for yourself and your social skills. Being able to talk about your work and getting people excited about it is just as important as building your technical skills. You'll get further faster if you can convince others on an idea and that you might need some extra time to see it through.

Make your own opportunities. Some of the best designers aren't just receiving big assignments, they are pitching their own stories that they want to tell.

Follow SND on Instagram for more design inspiration.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.