Role
Design Lead
TEAM
1 Design Lead, 6 Graphic Designers
Timeline
5 months (Mar - July 2025)
overview
Setting the Neural Stage
What is Brain Matters?
Brain Matters discusses all things neuroscience, psychology, and biology and features articles written by UIUC students. Authors come from diverse backgrounds, allowing volumes to have a wide range of articles from neurotechnology to disease biology. The journal is mainly written for the college community, yet is accessible to anyone as an open access journal by the university library.
The Problem
Brain Matters suffers from an outdated article layout with few visual design elements, making its content daunting for those without a neuroscience background.
Our Solution
A new article template that effectively uses images, color, and typography to make neuroscience topics engaging and approachable for the general pubilc.
Ideate
The Brainstorming Begins
The existing article template
Although the existing design was used for several past issues, it hadn't been updated in three years and fell short in a few areas. The president of Brain Matters expressed interest in a journal redesign featuring more interesting design elements and allowing the journal to reach a wider audience. From here, our design board analyzed the template and identified key things we'd like to change:
Looking at other university journals
We took a look at science journals from other universities, such as UCSD's Saltman Quarterly, the Northwestern University Research Journal, and the UNC Journal of Undergraduate Research. From here, we noted layout elements that we'd like to take inspiration from and incorporate into Brain Matters, such as:
UCSD features title pages that are unique to each article.
Northwestern uses color and callout quotes to grab attention.
UNC includes author biographies at the end of each article.
Brainstorming session
Using other journal designs as a reference, yet staying true to the branding of Brain Matters, we ideated ways that we could make the article layout more interesting. This included:
title page
Half-Page Images
Large images help title pages stand out and mark the beginning of an article, as well as giving visual clues to each article topic.
Use of Color
Each article is given a different color theme, making it easy to differentiate articles as readers flip through the journal.
article body
Callout Quotes
Important quotes allow readers to skim articles and find interesting facts that they may want to read more about. They also provide visual breaks in walls of text.
Title Headers
Every odd-numbered page features the article title so that readers can easily figure out the topic of each page.
last page
Author Bios
The end of each article features an author biography so that readers can put a face and personality to each article.
Page Numbers
In contrast to the previous design that only featured page numbers on every other page, the new design includes page numbers on every page for easier navigation.
deliverable
Synaptic Snapshots
The final journal design
Here's an example of a full article using the new template!
Interested in seeing more?
Take a look at the full journal issues below!
reflection
After the Experiment
Learnings & Takeaways
Designing such a large journal was intimidating at first, but I had a wonderful team to divvy up the 30 articles across the two journal issues. I also learned the importance of having thorough formatting guidelines to ensure that everyone's articles looked cohesive. At the end, there were a lot of minor tweaks that were necessary to ensure every page was formatted consistently. If I could do it all over again, I'd make more detailed guidelines from the beginning. But, altogether, leading this journal redesign was a great experience that I'm proud to have worked on!