Senior Marriya Schwarz, an Opus Literary Magazine editor-in-chief, designed a flamboyant and intriguing spread for the past year’s issue, Silhouette. The spread had a full color giraffe with a green background and a notebook spine down the center of the two pages.
To make this design work, Schwarz spent endless Cougar Times editing and shaping the art with a poem small enough to not cover the giraffe image. Once she was finished, last year’s editor in chief’s Silvana Smith and Shirley Song decided to make Schwarz’ piece the center spread. With the issue being extremely successful, Opus adviser Mrs. Susan Sullivan suggested that the staff enter the National Scholastic Press Association Design of the Year competition. With close examination, the staff decided to send Schwarz design in to compete. In September, the team learned that her design had reached the top 10 finalists in the entire country.
To find out the results, they had to wait until the NSPA/JEA convention in Orlando on November 14. While a majority of the students who attended the trip to Florida spent their time at amusement parks on the day of the award ceremony, some of Schwarz’s friends sacrificed their time to support her. On that day she won second place out of hundreds of other competitors from across the country, a huge honor. “It’s really nice to be recognized. It’s a really cool feeling. I especially appreciate all of the support that I have gotten from teachers and fellow students after they heard about what I won. For example, my Spanish teacher was nice enough to show my whole class my design on the projector. Also, my drama teacher honored me in front of the whole class using an energy circle. It was a really great feeling. Also, now, I feel a bit more confident in my designing skills. Last year, I didn’t really know what I was doing so I only had one spread in the magazine. I was too afraid to take risks. This past year, I had a bunch of designs that made it into the final magazine.” said Schwarz.
Schwarz now has a national award under her belt and continues to work on beautiful and creative designs for this year’s issue of Opus.
