Rachel G Weeks

As a design apprentice for upper-scale decorating magazine Traditional Home, I created layouts that ranged from single-page collages to five-spread feature stories. I learned to select images that highlight the home's best qualities and to design layouts that allow readers to comfortably explore the home on the page. These layouts—after a few rounds of edits—ran in the print publication, reaching roughly 4.6 million people each month.

As a senior journalism student at Drake University, I participated in a one-semester capstone project in which we—19 upper-class students and a faculty advisor—created a publication from scratch. The result was Think Mag, an award-winning online news magazine and tablet produced for Midwesterners by Midwesterners. During that semester, I served as the Think Mag editor-in-chief. I learned to develop a brand, manage a staff, maintain a website, promote a product and edit. I did lots and lots of editing. 

hile most of my time was spent managing the staff, I did contribute my own work to the Think Mag website. I wrote a weekly column called "Wiki Wednesday," delving into interesting Wikipedia articles relevant to the Midwest. I also created aggregated content when needed—about a Chicago artist and, later, about the Wisconsin Film Festival—and designed various infographics, images and tablet layouts.

It's not hard to tell that the current Java Joe's website needs an extreme makeover; so I gave it one, a hypothetical one. Using some of the existing content and images, I restructured, rewrote and redesigned the site to make it  more useful, more intuitive and more appealing.

As a web editor for beauty and fashion website divinecaroline.com, I designed and edited this 21-page web download to encourage readers to sign-up for our weekly beauty newsletter. Photos were provided by Meredith staff photographers and our regular beauty bloggers. 

As a former swimmer and long-time swim meet attendee, I decided to design an application that would make keeping track of your swimmers easy. Using content and branding information from Maverick Swim Club, a team I used to swim for, I designed the basic structure of an app that keeps track of up to six swimmers' times, achievements, events and practices. 

This handmade booklet was designed to showcase Who We Are: Manifesto of the Constructivist Group by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksei Gan using an appropriate constructivist aesthetic. It features a range of typographic treatments and geometric illustration but maintains a very simple color palette. 

I create this wall calendar to explore color palettes especially as they relate to emotion and feeling. While typography is important in this piece, the calendar's ever-changing shapes and color palettes are what make it such a fun, modern calendar. 

I researched and created this infographic as a freelance designer for the student-run tablet publication Urban Plains magazine. It breaks down the demographics of their audience by examining the residents of the Midwest’s biggest and mid-sized cities.

As a comedy fan and proponent of quality web design, I created a hypothetical redesign of the Funny Bone Comedy Club website and logo. The redesign includes a simpler, responsive website and a more modern logo to bring the company into the 21st century.

During the 2013 school board elections, I created this infographic about the Des Moines public school system for the Drake journalism website. It educates its audience on the districts changing demographics, test scores, income levels and programs using data illustrations and striking typography.

This downloadable booklet was designed to educate the public about the available Des Moines parks and recreation centers on each side of town. It features information about each park's safety, activity, and convenience and summarizes it all into a general rating. 

As a communications and design intern for POPAI in Chicago, I created and wrote this trifold to promote POPAI‘s first big educational event in Asia. 

As a communications and design intern at POPAI in Chicago, I created this infographic for our weekly Infographic Friday post. It details the tween marketing techniques discussed in POPAI‘s study of tween shopping behavior.

As the Art Director for campus newspaper, The Times-Delphic special Drake Relays edition, I took the basic structure of the weekly paper and created a style guide to suit the bigger, full-color issue and the theme created by the Relays Editor. This paper's theme was velocity.

I created this poster to illustrate the amount of water expended to make 2L of Coca-Cola. I hoped to make my audience aware of the "water footprint" behind some of the choices they make.

Jest, a magazine sponsored by Comedy Central, born from a thoroughly researched business plan, designed to suit the “innovative, irreverent, clever,” and “smart” Comedy Central audience, placed first in the Individual Startup Magazine Project category of the annual Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) contest in 2013

I created this handmade booklet to showcase typefaces with circle motifs, including: Avenir, Avant Garde, Gill Sans, Futura and Gotham. The booklet includes full uppercase and lowercase alphabets of each typeface, a short summary of the type's creation, and a quote from the type's designer.