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WCU Stories

WCU student magazine wins first place in publications contest

Brinson Honors College

 

By Cam Adams

In the fall, it starts as small as a story pitch. In the spring? As tiny as a sketch on a piece of paper. Those little ideas turn into Imagine magazine, a publication produced by student writers and designers at Western Carolina University.

Each year’s edition is always colorful, unique and rich in content, but last year’s was award-winning.

Imagine magazine’s 2023 issue placed first in the National Collegiate Honors Council Publications Contest’s faculty/administrator/student print magazine category.

“It was good to see it get an award. I enjoy working on that project every year, really just seeing what the students will come up with,” said John Ballentine, WCU Communications and Marketing senior art director, who supervises the magazine’s student designers.

“It’s pretty cool seeing it get recognized, and I’ve let the students who’ve worked on that design know that. Hopefully, they’re excited about that, too.”

The National Collegiate Honors Council, an association of undergraduate honors programs, colleges, deans and more, rebranded its competition to include magazines this year, as Imagine was one of just three honored.

Ballentine and Jeremy Jones, an associate professor of English Studies inside the College of Arts and Sciences, assist students every year in the creation of the magazine.

Jones works with first-year Brinson Honors College students with the writing portion of the magazine in the fall semester, and Ballentine and his group work on the design in the spring. However, both will admit they don’t do much of the magic behind the scenes.

Imagine Magazine Cover

2023 cover of Imagine magazine

The students do.

“It’s nice because we get to kind of exercise our own creativity a little more,” said student designer Natalie Fletcher, a senior from Hendersonville studying graphic design. “I think, especially in our classes, there’s a lot of constraints about what we’re allowed to do, and there’s some for these, but it is more freedom of expression and getting to try new things, so it’s good for experimentation and all kinds of stuff.”

In Jones’ first-year creative writing class, students find an idea, pitch it, schedule interviews and photoshoots, write the stories and rewrite them until they’re ready for publication. In the spring, the class hands the project over to Ballentine and his crew.

The student designers read through the stories and generate design ideas through layouts, mood boards and sketches. Then, Ballentine’s staff has a series of critiques before they proofread and do pre-press work.

Every year, that process puts out a stellar magazine with the words inside the pages not being your average stories.

“(The stories are) fairly short. They tend to be profiles about students or student groups, but the goal is always to have a story, to have something that’s more nuanced and kind of more layered,” Jones said.

“I’d like to think that the stories in there are doing that work, and that might be why they stood out.”

And the art isn’t ordinary either. It was all award-winning after all.

“I think what makes them strong every year is just how it’s such diverse content,” Ballentine said. “There’s such a wide range of things being written about and strong photos, illustrations, I mean, it’s such a wide range of things that always make it a super interesting magazine."

 

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