Paperbark Magazine is an interdisciplinary print & digital magazine, run primarily by graduate students at UMass Amherst. During my last semester of undergrad, Professor Jeffery Kasper (one of the magazine's faculty advisors) told me they were seeking graphic designers! I was hired alongside fellow designers Paolo Brandon and Joey Lorant. None of us had ever laid out a magazine before, but by the end of the semester, we had come up with something we were extremely proud to send to print.

As one of the Co-Managing Designers, I was in charge of our 100-page InDesign master document and maintaining an organizational structure for all accompanying files. One of my favorite parts was honestly preflight / prepress! Checking that everything was in the correct color space; clearing out paragraph or character style overrides to ensure consistency; finalizing parts of the magazine that changed constantly during editing, like the table of contents; adding the proper printer's marks... it was a majorly satisfying process for me.

This was my first paid job as purely a designer, rather than as someone who mostly does marketing. Even though I had done plenty of design work before Paperbark, it never felt right to call myself a graphic designer—finishing this project made me feel like I had finally earned that title.