// Design, writing & photography
Design, writing, and photography.
We're building a real page for every club at OTHS. It has to look good and read well, and that is not a coder's job. This is the track that does it — no code required, every tool free, and your work goes live with your name on it. Whatever you're good at, there is almost certainly a version of it that this site needs.
A committed track · about 2–3 hrs a week including the meeting · no portfolio and no audition — you join by asking
// The work
What you'd actually do.
Page design
You pick a club at OTHS and draft a concept for its page: the layout, the hierarchy, what a visitor should see first. You bring it to critique, the room takes it apart, and the version that survives goes live.
Real constraints teach more than invented exercises, and a critique whose outcome is a published page gets taken seriously in a way that a folder of mockups never does.
Ghostwriting
Most clubs at OTHS have nobody in their leadership who wants to sit down and write about themselves. So we do it for them: a conversation with a sponsor or a club president, and we write the page for them to approve.
That service is the reason most of the school ends up with a page at all, and what it needs is somebody who can ask a good question and listen to the answer.
Photography
Photos of real meetings, taken by someone who was there. A page with one is worth considerably more than a page without, and almost no club here has either.
Illustration, and whatever else you do
A hundred clubs need a hundred pages, and the list above is not the whole of what goes into one. If you draw, there are clubs with no photo worth using and a spot where a drawing would be better. If you're the person who ends up writing everyone's captions, that's this. If you're organized in a way that makes messy information make sense, that's genuinely half of what a good club page is.
We take all of it. Nobody here is going to tell you your thing isn't design — the page has to work, and most of what makes a page work isn't Figma.
How your work gets in
Through Figma, through a shared content folder, or through GitHub's web editor if you'd like to try it. No code required, no terminal involved. Every contribution passes a review before it goes live — same as the code, because the site carries the school's name.
All you have to do is ask
There is no application, no portfolio review, and no audition. Tell any officer you want in — after a meeting, in the hall, on the Discord — and you're on the track. That's the entire process, and it's the same one for everybody.
The word "design" puts off a lot of the people this track needs most. If you can sit down with a club sponsor and write up clearly what they told you, there is real work here for you, whether or not you have ever opened Figma. Come and ask.
// How you get better
There is no Odin Project for design.
Code has an objective signal: it runs, or it doesn't. Design has none. You can follow every lesson faithfully and still produce something ugly, and nothing will tell you. That's a structural problem, and it's why the field never produced a canonical free curriculum the way web development did — what exists instead is expensive bootcamps, thin filler courses, and books.
So the critique sessions here are not a supplement to a design curriculum. They are the curriculum.
How a critique runs
- The presenter states the goal and the constraints before showing anything.
- Feedback comes as observations and questions, never as preferences. "My eye lands on the photo before the club name — is that intended?" rather than "make the title bigger."
- The presenter takes notes silently while the feedback happens, and responds at the end.
We hold to that format, because a critique that isn't held to turns into everyone saying "looks good" fairly quickly. Giving and taking criticism that way is also a skill that carries well past this club.
// The practical part
What it takes, and what it costs.
Tools — all free
- Figma, free for verified students on the Education plan. Its own beginner tutorials cover what you need; the tool is a smaller part of this than people expect.
- Butterick's Practical Typography, free to read online. A good deal of the difference between "looks professional" and "looks like a school project" comes down to type size, line length, and spacing.
- Nothing to install. A school Chromebook is enough for all of it.
What you're committing to
This is a committed track, so here is the whole of it in writing, before you say yes rather than after:
- Roughly two to three hours a week, including the meeting.
- Answer review within a few days. Someone read your work; leaving them hanging stalls the queue.
- Show up, or say you can't. Either is fine. Going quiet is the only thing that isn't.
- Everything you push, you can explain. A reviewer can ask you to walk through your own work in a critique.
That's the entire list, and there is nothing else hiding behind it. There's no audition, no prerequisite course, and no track record you have to show first — you join by saying you want in.
If it stops working out
Nobody gets removed from this club for falling behind. A season, a job, a rough semester — say so and take a declared leave, and your seat is still there. That's a normal thing to do and we would much rather you did it than disappeared.
If it keeps not working, you move back to the learning track: still in the club, still in the room, still on the Discord, and the door back into this one stays open on exactly the same terms as everyone else. Two officers handle that conversation, never one, and it doesn't happen in front of anybody.
Time, in hours
Fall: the one-hour all-hands meeting, plus an hour or two of your own — about two to three a week all in. Spring costs more, and we'd rather say so now than let you find it out in January: the all-hands, plus a 45-minute session for this track on top, plus one to two hours of your own. If that's more than you have when spring arrives, say so and step back — see above.
Experience
None assumed, and none checked. If you have opinions about how things look and can't fully explain them yet, that's a normal place to start — being able to explain them is most of what the critique loop teaches.
Cost
Nothing. No dues, no software to buy, no materials.
Your work goes live with your name on it.
Sign up in the terminal — five questions, and "design" is one of the answers. Or skip the form entirely and just tell an officer you want in, which works exactly as well. You can switch tracks later; nobody's holding you to it.