Yo haven't lived until you've attempted to draw a bra and panties onto a stick figure in Adobe Illustrator.

I'm a designer -- that's my job here at The Daily Collegian.

Over the past summer, I've hung shirts on a line graph, made a cutout of a juggling frog with naked breasts and constructed a diagram of a man-Smurf wearing clothes that violate the Cell Block's dress code.

This brings me to the aforementioned incident involving women's undergarments.

To spruce up a graphic about how more men than women have had 15 or more sex partners, we decided to slap some fun underwear onto the Collegian's stock male and female stick figures.

Problem was, I was having trouble drawing the female stick figure's brassiere.

I ended up resorting to Google image search to aid me in my lingerie construction.

When this was discovered by certain staff members at the Collegian, i.e., everyone, I became the subject of much ridicule.

So later that week I turned the tables and asked four of them to draw a bra for me on a paper napkin.

Here were the results: something that looked like three Toblerone pieces stacked on each other, two circles connected by a line, two pears attached conjoined-twin style and something that looked like a medieval torture device.

Point being, it's hard to draw a bra.

But you know what?

It's a good thing that we finally figured it out. Design is important because people read the newspaper with their eyes.

It is very difficult to read the Collegian through licking.

The problem with print is that we only have the space of one page to present our photos, graphics and text.

As much as we'd like to include old-school, popup flaps under which we can hide extra content, I don't think our printing press is set up to handle that just yet.

So thank goodness for the Internet -- with our Web site, we can post as many images or graphics as we want.

For example, on Travis' Travels, my Daily Collegian Online blog, I am able to post digital photos, illustrations and YouTube videos in order to illustrate through the power of visuals what would take me far more effort and imagination to explain with words.

The best I can do in terms of visuals for this print column is the following emoticon:
;-)

See?

He's winking at you.

At the same time, however, the print medium affords us cool design opportunities that the Internet does not.

Just as Michelangelo needed a block of stone to sculpt the statue of David or a church ceiling to vandalize with lewd imagery, so too do page designers need a blank page to create truly awesome content.

If you don't believe me, maybe you recall our Rene Portland timeline from March.
Or check out Venues tomorrow -- I hear it's possibly been redesigned or something.

Now that it's the fall, we have a big staff of photographers and page designers, not to mention a team of graphic artists who are much better than I am at drawing underwear. Check out their awesome work in print and on the Web.

And hey, maybe you want to be one of us. That's cool too. Look in the Collegian for information on how to join the candidate program for the photo or graphics staffs.

If you want to be a designer like me, all you have to do is join the reporter candidate program, report for a semester and then apply to be an editor.

And don't get discouraged if you're rejected twice.

I was, and look where I am now.

Travis Larchuk is a senior, majoring in journalism and is The Collegian's managing editor of design. His e-mail is tjl5002@psu.edu.