Full disclosure: This project is how I hook students into designing and sometimes writing for a student publication.

We start with finding an article that inspires some imagery that a student can find in the school or home environment for a digital collage. I limit the article topics to education, and provide students with a number of reliable news sources, including their school publication. We review techniques that we’ve practiced in Photoshop and Illustrator, then students have free range to combine programs and techniques in order to create a digital composite image.

For the text layout, we introduce InDesign. It’s fun to show students examples of student news publications as they work. Once they understand how complex it is to create a cohesive page, they appreciate the work so much more.