It is 4 a.m. and you are fast asleep in your bed. Suddenly you are awakened with the news that Osama Bin Laden is dead. What's a designer to do? As junior Nina Mehta found out last week, you get up as fast as you can, head down to the newsroom, and redesign your entire layout while the camera crew captures your every move.

This was not an ordinary day in the newsroom and the assignment was clearly fictitious, but Mehta nevertheless scrambled to rub the sleep from her eyes and adjust to the change in plans. As a participant in "The Intern," a competition held by the Society for News Design for young designers, she was willing to be put through the wringer for the chance to win an internship at a national paper.

"It was really intense, and a lot of people's strengths and weaknesses showed," said Mehta, recounting the week's adventures in Orlando. "Some challenges were straightforward, some were fake-outs and a few were just downright cruel."

After a week of design challenges and judging, Mehta placed fifth out of the 10 competitors and earned an internship at the Indianapolis Star. She was pleased to have done so well, especially since she was younger than nearly all of her competitors. She was also excited to have the opportunity to learn more about her future career.

"I have really been exposed to the design culture this week and affirmed that I want to be a part of it," said Mehta. "Design is a broad enough field that I can do anything."

The last days of the competition coincided with SND's annual conference, which meant competitors attended workshops, listened to speakers and met with design professionals who were attending the conference.

"The networking and exposure were unreal. You cannot pay to get to talk to and become friends with the people who were there," said Mehta, who was able to meet her new colleagues at the Indianapolis Star, among others.

An internship at the Star is a dream job for Mehta, who has been involved in design since sixth grade. She began her career designing Web pages and has since designed everything from logos for an energy drink to the front pages of IDS.

Students at IU who are interested in design often gain hands-on experience by working at the IDS and Arbutus, but visual competency is also one of the key tenets of the School of Journalism's program. It offers a number of design electives, and courses in visual communications are required for all journalism students.

"It's clear that we live in a visual age. Everybody wants their message to have a visual component," said professor Claude Cookman, who teaches courses in visual communications and design. "You have a certain amount of content and a certain amount of visual space. The question is how to arrange that content in that space."

Another award-winning designer from IU, senior Mark Koenig, also attended the conference. Koenig won SND's Student Designer of the Year contest in April, and his prize included all-expenses paid attendance at the conference. In addition to having the opportunity to meet with the country's design elite, he also ended up winning a new Apple laptop in a raffle at the Casino Night fundraiser.

Koenig saw Mehta and the other competitors in action, as attendees at the conference voted on the final winners. Conference attendees viewed one-minute videos and posters that had been designed over the summer by each finalist, and then voted for their top three choices.

Mehta's video was a mock trailer for a movie entitled "The Clipping Path," a pun on a design tool with the same name. In the video, Mehta humorously explains the anxiety she felt about choosing design as her career path. For her poster, she designed a DVD cover for her movie. Koenig noted that she was the only competitor who had tied the video and poster together with a single theme and commented that her concept was "clever and well thought-out."

Koenig, who has worked with Mehta at the IDS, spoke highly of her design skills.

"She takes a lot of chances and really thinks outside the box. She wants to go above and beyond and think creatively," he said. "I assume that's what they saw in her when they picked her for the top five."


Read Mehta's blog from the competition.

Read about Mark Koenig's awards from earlier this year.

Check out Koenig's portfolio.