Get an Eye for Design: Use Canva

"Create a magazine about..."

Anyone else have an assignment like this at your school?

Renaissance Magazine

Our ninth graders write and publish magazines about Renaissance times. They create various articles to practice different text types and follow the research process.

It's a massive project, and in years past we've marveled at students' hard work but felt "meh" about the visual presentation of their information.

This year, we're tackling visual presentation skills directly in our High School Foundations course for ninth graders.

Here's the plan:

Examine various magazines and analyze the effectiveness of design and layout. 

For discussion, start with Magazine Layout slideshow
For practice, use Layout "Notice and Note" sheet

Learn some publishing lingo (see articles here and here)

Take the design school tutorials at Canva to learn about elements such as mixing fonts, effective layouts, and use of color

A few of Canva's tutorials

Use Canva to create a suitable cover (create a free account)

Next step: Work with publishing software to create columns, text and image boxes, pull-quotes, captions, headings and subheadings.