The Daily Gamecock is an independent student newspaper at the University of South Carolina that is distributed both digitally and in print. For two semesters, I created editorial illustrations to accompany articles authored by fellow members that were featured in the email edition sent out to subscribers, including the student body and faculty.
The process of creating these involved deliberate collaboration with the writers and my design team student leaders. The student leaders would compile all the articles for the week into a document and they were claimed on a first-come-first-serve basis. After claiming an article, I would have access to the authors' files from the back-end and would begin each illustration by thoroughly reading the articles to understand what was being discussed. I determined tone and audience first then developed rough sketches. I wanted to capture a certain emotion in each piece through color theory and composition. These were primarily drawn in Procreate.
This experience was my first exposure to adhering to a style guide. One of the protocols at the time was that facial features were not permitted in illustrations. This was to make the people more universal. Any reader could see themself in the picture. This rule inspired me to start working in a line-less style to develop my shape language skills, which later contributed to me understanding how to create better vector drawings.