Eastlake grad wins national sports page design contest
May 18, 2010
By Christopher Huber
Colleen Kirsten, a 2005 Eastlake High School graduate, loves it when, while walking on the University of Washington campus, people stop in their tracks to read the sports page she designed, she said.
And to some of the leading sports page designers in the country, Kirsten has skills and insights beyond her age. She’s clever and has a knack for attention-grabbing graphics.
Kirsten recently won Best of Sports Design 2009 for college designers. The contest was part of SportsDesigner.com’s annual professional- and college-level page design contest.
She was more excited about making the top three than when she actually won, she said.
“Honestly, I was more excited about just getting the nomination,” Kirsten said. “When I found out I was a finalist I was jumping up and down and squealing with excitement.”
Josh Crutchmer, of the Chicago Tribune, and co-founder of SportsDesigner.com, said Kirsten’s work impressed him on multiple levels. Some of her designs, he said, could have been considered in the professional “open” category of the competition, up against the best papers in the world.
“First, the illustrations she did were done at an exceptionally high level,” Crutchmer said in an e-mail to the Review. “It’s common to see a student illustration that looks like a student did it, and that’s fine. But hers would fit in at a lot of metro sports sections.”
Kirsten has designed newspaper pages for UW’s The Daily for three years. She spent two years as a news-page designer and made the move to sports in 2009 for the challenge of it, she said.
“(I ask) ‘how can I get a readership that really isn’t interested in what’s written about on their campus and in their community?” Kirsten said. “I like sports because you can have more personality than in news. There’s more elements on the page I can play around with.”
Journalism was the last thing Kirsten wanted to get into in high school at Eastlake, she said. She was the head of the school’s drama team and was interested in graphics.
She had taken a Photoshop class as a junior and the only available elective her senior year was journalism. Building her skills with Photoshop and InDesign, Kirsten became the go-to person in class for page design at the Eastlake Edge newspaper, she said.
It wasn’t until her sophomore year at the UW that Kirsten got back into designing.
More than it being a fun college job to have, sports design draws on her mathematical and artistic talents at the same time, she said.
“My favorite is how many different people it takes to make a page work, and how many different tools and technology it takes to make a page,” Kirsten said. “It’s one of the only fields I’ve found that stimulates various different interests of mine.”
Due to her efforts outside of the SportsDesigner.com contest, Kirsten landed a summer internship at the Virginia Pilot.
More importantly than landing a gig in an ever more competitive journalism industry, Kirsten said she is honored that professionals appreciate her work. She’s self-taught, for the most part, and is looking forward to having a mentor.
“I most look forward to being able to ask people questions,” she said. “People that I look up to think I’m worth something.”
While judging the contest entries, Crutchmer, who founded the website in 2004 with Rich Boudet, of the Seattle Times, saw how Kirsten makes her pages fun, with clever headlines and strong, witty graphics.
“The headlines were creative, and the design was clear and easy to follow,” Crutchmer said. “If you can do those things at the college level, you are going to have a future in sports design.”
View Kirsten’s page design portfolio here.
Reporter Christopher Huber can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 242, or chuber@isspress.com.
Other Stories of Interest: Eastlake High School
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