Hi. I'm Alex Miller
// an editorial designer //

     
I've been creating eye-catching news pages for the past decade, working at newsrooms in Daytona Beach, Florida; Hilo, Hawaii; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and currently I lay out the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I've also served as design chief for Fifth Wednesday Journal, an influential literary magazine out of Chicago.  Check out my work below, and if there’s anything I can do for you, please ​shoot me an email at miller.alex.77@gmail.com.
     
The terrorist attack of July 16, 2015, was one of the most devastating events the city of Chattanooga had experienced in a generation. On the anniversary of the shooting, one of our photojournalists took this amazing shot. As soon as I saw it, I knew the thrust of my design would be to run it big and get out of its way.
I really had to sell this design to my editor. At the time, the Tribune Herald typically ran five stories on its front page every day, so committing the entire space to one overarching story was a major departure. This was definitely the right story to go big on. Hawaii Island is a place that's fairly consumed by its own history, and this story really resonated with the audience, in particular the native Hawaiians, who often feel overlooked by the government -- and news media -- of their homeland.
This is the cover I designed for the Fall 2016 issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal. The photo wrapping across the front and back panels is by Michelle Litvin, a Midwest photographer whose work is influenced by her interest in Daoism, tai chi and Japanese tea traditions.
On the morning after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, I woke up, reached for my phone and discovered a worrisome backlog of AP alerts and emails from my editors. I got out of bed and began sketching out a framework for my front page design. 

All week long, the paper had been running a graphic advertising Chattanooga's biggest yearly music festival at the top of the page. On this day, I moved it below the fold and used it as a natural divider between the downpage stories.
Great work is sometimes driven by desperation. One weekend, the editors of the Chattanooga Times Free Press chose to centerpiece a story about how little Tennessee spends compared to other states on anti-smoking programs. It was a great story, but nobody thought to assign any art. So -- on deadline -- I scavenged a few nice pieces of stock photography, added a little Photoshop magic, and ended up with one of my favorite front pages of all time. I deviated from the paper's usual style by centering all the headlines, and, in this case, it makes the entire page more cohesive and harmonious (a trick that Canada's National Post figured out years ago).