Who is Audrey?
Audrey Westcott, the Director of Design for WUPR, uses her illustration skills to bring to life the literary content of this student publication. Take a look at how she interprets the political commentary of the magazine and offers a creative visual counterpart to its articles.
// CONNECT
Want to connect with Audrey? Email her at audreyw@wustl.edu.
// INTERVIEW
On her role…
My job starts pretty much after everyone else’s is done. I get people to sign up to do illustrations for the articles. We’ve gotten some pretty great stuff from people. For design, I have a small layout team of really great people. We try to pinpoint articles that have more complicated types of design work before and work on those first.
On the biggest challenge of doing a layout for WUPR…
A huge challenge is the short timeframe that we work with. We have usually less than a week to put this whole thing together design-wise and a lot of times there are problems we’re not expecting that have to be dealt with. It’s kind of an organizational chaos sometimes, but I’m pretty proud of what we manage to do within the amount of time we have to work with.
On her favorite issues…
One of our recent issues was a lot of fun to work on. I had editorial control over the theme of the issue and got to come up with my own way of illustrating the current job scarcity.
On her political views…
My personal opinions don’t usually come in to play with the work I do. Mostly my role is just to bring the content other people who are more knowledgeable I am on these topics have created. I try to bring that to the student body in a way that they can easily digest.
On her thought process…
I start with lists, actually. I’ll read the article, try to highlight the main ideas and then come up with possible things I can actually draw that would convey the ideas that are in the article. It usually looks like a little word map, I guess, and I pick words that I think are the most clear and would be the most fun to draw. Then I go for it.
On squirrels and her apartment…
So my apartment is like a hundred years old and I don’t know what the deal is but every so often we hear some animal crawling around in the ceiling. We speculate that there’s a squirrel up there, and we’re all terrified that it’s going to crash through the ceiling some day and kill us all.
Collaborators: Briana Pickens, Justus Roberts, Dakari Quimby, Celso White