Introduction
The Canadian Journal of Undergraduate Research was founded in 2015 by a group of students at the University of British Columbia as a platform to publish research work by Canadian undergraduates, helping them get hands-on experience with the peer-review process and boosting their CVs. I volunteered in October 2019 to lead the journal's redesign.
Cover
In designing the journal's cover I wanted to convey as much of the most interesting articles' main points while keeping the look as smooth and clean as possible. I also wanted to make each edition visually distinct while further underscoring the main subject of the cover stories, hence the blown-up background images used in the new format. The design is dominated by the new logo and wordmark I designed in Adobe Illustrator. Vertical lines attract the reader's attention downwards towards the cover story.
The choice of cover image for each issue is intended to allude to the cover story's subject, either by allegory (left) or more general imagery (right). Below this a further two articles are previewed to create a sense of depth and variety for each issue.
Front matter
Each issue is prefaced by a letter from the chief editor, as well as a running list of the editors and designer (me) involved in the publication, followed by the table of contents.
As it was for the cover page, the cover page is dominated by large headings and a set of images, also inspired by the subjects discussed in the listed articles.
Articles
Articles begin with a large header consisting of the title, the authors, their institutional affiliations, and a small information box listing the date of publication, the article citation, and copyright information. The body is led by the article abstract, set apart from the rest of the article, which then follows.
Few articles published in the journal used images and graphic figures, but those that did posed a challenge as many of these had to be displayed in large sizes to be legible, or else were accompanied by long captions. Special effort was made to limit these to one-column width where possible.
