By 
By: JORDAN RAE LUCAS
Managing Editor
@JordanRae017
While our readers were sunning and sleeping this summer, the editors of The Preface have been hard at work bringing our paper into the 21st Century. Primarily we needed a facelift but we also wanted to make The Preface more student-focused and accessible by creating the first-ever Preface mobile app!
With help (a lot of help) from our new design editor, Keri O’Donnell, we completely redesigned the layout of our print edition. The decision to give the paper a makeover was made sometime in late March.
The real work began in late June and took several weeks of hard work and collaboration. I won’t use valuable column inches to detail the minutiae of our many, many conversations or list every font choice we used. Honestly, Keri did all the heavy lifting here and I probably couldn’t answer half of the design-related questions.
Ryan, my fellow editor, and I agreed that the print issue should be made to look as modern and streamlined as possible. That was pretty much all the direction we gave Keri and she ran with it, coming back with a first draft of the design that only required a few minor adjustments. We are all incredibly proud of the finished product.
This was just the first step in our paper renovation. With help from our now-graduated former web editor, Neil King, I redesigned and reorganized our website (http://iusbpreface.net/). Our page was pretty dated. We freshened it up with a crisp, white theme using touches of black and crimson for good measure.
I also created an updated, more user-friendly navigation menu for the website which was especially important for our new mobile app. That’s right! The Preface now has it’s own app! This will enable us to bring our readers the news daily right to the palm of their hands.
The app, which is hosted by iCampus Times and funded for the first year by the Student Government Association, was the inspiration for all these updates. We felt that if we were going to add new technology to our news outreach, we needed our other platforms to keep up.
We started the process of acquiring the app in January. Once we received the funding, it quickly became an “If You Give a Moose a Muffin” situation. I had the app, so I needed to sleeker website to keep it updated, and so on.
Not only will the app make it easier than ever to get news, but it will serve as a handy tool for students. With a campus map designed by our former editor, Cecelia Roeder, as well as local maps and weather, the app will be a great resource, especially for students new to the area. The app also contains a link to the new university hub, One, making it easier than ever to stay on top of things.
Most importantly, the new app will allow students to submit stories directly to the editors of The Preface. We want to increase student involvement as much as possible. We hope to create even more student-focused content than we have before to truly be a STUDENT paper.
We’re really proud of the work we’ve done this summer and we hope our readers will enjoy the new features. Feedback is, as always, encouraged and can be submitted through the “Submit News” feature or directly to our email, editorpreface@gmail.com.
The Preface Mobile is available for both iOS and Android devices and can be found by searching “IUSB Preface” in either app store. We’ve also included a QR code in this issue that will take our readers to the download page.
