You know what was actually a really useful bit of my masters? Learning the basics of InDesign. I moaned at first – ‘I’m never going to be a designer or a sub!’ – but, actually, that’s the point.

I totally agree with Dan Gillmor when he says that journalism students should be taught the basics of design and coding and then given the opportunity to work with students specialising in those fields.

He writes: ‘Teach students not just the basics of digital media but also the value of data and programming to their future work. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to become programmers; but they absolutely need to know how to communicate with programmers.’

The point is not to be able to design your own pages or web tools – I’m the daughter of a designer and sister to an illustrator so I’ve seen how annoyed they get when every other Apprentice contestant decides they can just ‘do’ graphic design. The point is it shows you what’s possible. It makes you think about the visual ways in which your message is conveyed: how important it is, what the potentials are.

For our MA final project, we had to write a series of features aimed at an existing magazine. Part of the brief was to lay out our work in the magazine’s style. I chose Stylist (you can see my attempts below) and found that paying close attention to the magazine’s design made me realise how integral the page furniture, headlines, standfirsts and box-outs are to the reading experience. It improved the way I wrote – I focused on, for example, my box-out case studies as important copy in their own right and not just an add-on.

Design is only going to become more important. As more and more reading is done online, journalists need to work with designers and programmers to make the most of the endless possibilities for delivering information. And, conversely, magazines must maximise the beauty of print if they are to compete.

Photo courtesy of luxuryluke