Student’s magazine project a labor of love

For her senior thesis, Jenna Bower wanted to create a collaborative project that combined her love of graphic design with her passion for sustainability.

The finished product — a 70-page, full-color magazine offering readers dozens of tips on incorporating sustainability into their lives — has already helped her land a job in Savannah, Georgia.

But Bower’s intent for the magazine project wasn’t just to help raise awareness about sustainability and environmental justice. Her goal also was to show what’s possible when you set your own objectives and collaborate with others to achieve something bigger.

“College students know they need to engage in resume-boosting activities that set them apart from the competition. What they don’t realize is that they can create these opportunities for themselves — if they take the initiative,” says Bower, who received her bachelor of fine art last weekend.

Bower will spend some time with family and friends in her hometown of Scottsville, New York, near Rochester, then pack up and head to Savannah to start her new gig as an advertising director for South magazine, a lifestyle publication and website that celebrates all things Southern living. She’ll also begin a summer internship with the Non-Fiction Gallery there.

In addition, Bower was accepted into the Design for Sustainability MFA program at Savannah College of Art and Design, where she hopes to continue publishing Humans for a Sustainable Future, the magazine she created for her UB thesis project.

Working on the magazine was essentially a part-time job throughout the year for Bower, who estimates she spent 20 hours a week doing everything from putting out calls for article and illustration submissions to drafting the production schedule and designing the publication. Contributors came from as close as UB and as far as Australia.

“This is definitely my baby, from conception of the idea to finished print product,” Bower says. “It covers an array of topics, including conservation, food waste and DIY recipes. I wanted to have something that everyone could connect with and that was as expansive as possible. It’s all laid out for a purpose. The first article is about sustainable brewing, which you wouldn’t normally think about when you think about the environment,” she adds.

The magazine is named after the grassroots organization Bower and her two roommates — Katrina Cropo and Shelby Marra — formed last summer. The trio was randomly paired together in UB campus housing freshman year, and they’ve been best friends ever since. “We’re like sisters now,” says Bower.

They started Humans for a Sustainable Future first on social media, sharing existing content in an effort to reach people who normally aren’t involved in the environmental movement.

After serving as The Spectrum’s creative director for a year, Bower knew she needed to branch out from the more constrictive world of newspaper design.

“This magazine allowed me to be more experimental and work with Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop — everything I’ve been using for the past four years in class projects — to make something of my own. It wasn’t like a class project where everything is outlined and you have to cover all these objectives. I really just created those objectives for myself,” she says.

One of Bower’s project mentors was Shasti O’Leary Soudant, a renowned Buffalo-based artist who received her MFA in visual studies from UB in 2011 and who taught a typography course Bower took. She also received guidance from Reinhard Reitzenstein and George Afedzi Hughes, both associate professors in the Department of Art.

In addition, Ralph Critelli’s introduction to environmental issues course, which Bower took this spring, informed much of the content she chose to include in the magazine. Critelli also contributed an article. “His class covered so much information. I thought I knew what I wanted to include in the magazine and then he would say something and I’d think, ‘I have to include that; it’s too important not to.’”

While in-class group work has its benefits, Bower says her project shows what can be achieved when students set their own objectives and truly believe in something. And she hopes her project will empower other students to create initiatives that instill positive change in areas in which they are passionate.

“Let your creativity wander,” she advises. “You can do whatever you want to do as long as you put everything you have behind it. We have so much in us; we just need to let it free.”