Hi, my Vertibabies!
It’s my last day as a member of the Vertigo Editorial Team, and after two long years of working on this magazine, both as a Student News Editor in 2024, and as Editor-in-Chief this year, I’m feeling strange, to say the least. I started writing this final farewell months ago, but have been putting it on the backburner; at first I thought I was just procrastinating for the sake of it, but putting pen to paper now and feeling the tears well in my eyes has made me realise that I so desperately do not want to let go of this magazine.
I love Vertigo and what it represents. Being able to platform some of the most fascinating and incredible student writing, fashion, artwork, and design that I’ve seen over the past two years has been so fulfilling. I feel very passionate about the community Vertigo has cultivated over the last 52 years.Throughout 2025 in particular, we have put in a metric fuckload of work to make Vertigo feel like more than just a magazine. We have transformed this beautiful niche into a space that anyone can exist in and celebrate themselves, their experiences, their writing and their creations freely and without hesitation.
Our university should be so proud that their students want to create and feel heard. That they’re producing such talented students—and not just at face value. I’m sick of the university branding itself as a “University of Technology”, when showcase and design is a part of this magazine that has been consistently undervalued and unappreciated by our higher-ups. After years of budget cuts to Vertigo, particularly post-pandemic, this year we birthed a new version of Vertigo. 2025 was the first year to see the results of huge restructuring, with Vertigo members elected individually into specific roles. At face value, this sounds fine, and for the most part it is! That is, until you realise there is only one official spot for a Designer to be on the team. One.
The aim?
To make the magazine less “design focused”... whatever that means.
Now, I’m quite a diplomatic person—I’m someone who is more than willing to compromise (albeit not without putting up a bit of a fight first), because more often than not, it’s the only way you’re going to reach a healthy solution. However, what the powers-that-be fail to recognise (because this decision was made practically without consultation from the outgoing 2024 team), is that even if you were to design the magazine completely with templates, it would still take tens of hours to design an entire magazine, and is far too much work for only one person.
Also, to be frank, I find that a bit boring. Designing articles based on their content elevates the pieces and aids in its storytelling, even for hard news. We’re not a newspaper, we’re a magazine, as our whole shtick as Vertigo Magazine implies, and I’m tired of this push from higher-ups to make us otherwise. If you’re going to invest tens of thousands of dollars to print these magazines, at least let us make them look good.
Vertigo is as much of a platform for people to write as it is for people to design. Being on the Editorial Team is a way to exercise our creativity, collaboration, and administrative skills, making room for students of all degrees, not just those in Communications, despite the huge amount of us that flock here from it. We ideate, we edit, we design, we plan, we host events, we budget, we record (and do hundreds of hours of admin…save me). At the core of it, we exist to uplift the student body, but, at the end of the day, we are part of that student body.
I’m rambling now, but the point of me saying this is that despite only having one official designer, we rose above this challenge and produced five gorgeous 82 paged magazines this year. With Design Director Miss Arkie Thomas at the helm, truly anything was possible. I am so endlessly proud of this girl, and endlessly grateful for the thousands of hours she’s put into Vertigo this year. Our powerhouse of a General Editor, Jonnie, also took it upon themselves to learn InDesign during the short campaigning period in September of last year, determined to help Arkie with designing spreads if elected, and boy, did they do a fantastic job at doing so. I’d also like to give a special mention to Nate, who came on as an honorary team member for our last two editions for the year to split the brunt of the design work with Arkie, and to all the beautiful VisComm students who helped out with spreads—we could not have done it without you!
This year was the first to ensure that half the pieces in a printed edition were required to be Student News, per the new bylaws. Previously, student news was predominantly written by members of the editorial team, particularly the two student news editors. Because there were no quotas in place, that wasn’t a huge issue. Come this year, and since each edition had around 15 pieces, it meant that eight of those had to be student news… so for obvious reasons, it isn’t sustainable for only the student news editors to be tackling those articles. It’s also important to note that the reason these articles were previously predominantly written by members of the editorial team was because no one submitted student news to the magazine. Clearly things needed to change.
So, we, but particularly our Student News Editors, Eryn and Emanie, were tasked with the challenge of changing the culture and perception of student news. Eryn was one of my MVPs for the year—without her sourcing and writing the immense majority of these student news articles, we would have failed to meet our quotas every time. Not only did we do so without fail, they were also really fucking good. Eryn is one of the most incredible writers and, frankly, people I've ever met, and I absolutely cannot wait to see where life takes her, because anyone would be lucky to work with (or for) her. Thanks to our student news editors this year, we are finally seeing student news articles trickle into our submissions email organically!! YAY!! As someone who originally hated the non-negotiable institution of quotas (because it also meant that only 30% of our articles can be “showcase”, encompassing creative writing, photography, fashion, art, etc.), I do think that appealing to the average uni student through more pieces that touched on student life and experiences allowed us to broaden our audience (shocker).
We turned an initially worrying rule into something fun and engaging, meaning that more people are now reading, creating, submitting, and having their voices heard. And that is why we exist.
The 2025 team has poured our souls into the magazine, playing with the cards that we’ve been dealt in the best way possible to revitalise Vertigo. I can say with my full chest that we have done so. Vertigo magazines have never flown off the shelves faster, our social media engagement has skyrocketed, our parties were awesome, and we have received more submissions this year than we did last year. To top it all off, we were the first team in a decade (according to Biljana) to hand in all five of our editions by the final day of classes for the year, which is our deadline. Snaps to us!
If I could work on this publication forever, I would. If I had all the money in the world, I would invest it all in this student magazine. I know Vertigo could have the potential to be so much bigger than it is; I'm not talking about the size of the print magazine, though. I’m talking about its reach. What it means to people. What it does. The different programs and channels we could reach people from. We have had ENDLESS ideas this year, but the reality is we can only do so much. Because at the end of the day we are students and, unfortunately, do not have unlimited time, nor is this our livelihood.
In all, it has been so rewarding to see people from all corners of the university collaborate on a project like Vertigo. I want to give a shoutout to the UTSSA this year for being so cooperative, particularly Mia, Januka, Billjana and Mariah. I’m not sure if you’ll end up reading this, but I am so grateful that we patched up this historically contentious relationship. Though we have not always been on the exact same page on what our personal ideas for Vertigo’s future would look like, you have always given us the benefit of the doubt and trusted us to deliver, and here we are with what SRC President Mia Campbell has called “the best year Vertigo has had in recent memory”.
Hell yeah.
These words, which I first heard in September, have been ringing in my ears for months now—there have been times this year where I have been so incredibly proud of the work we have done, but have always been afraid that it wasn’t good enough in the eyes of the university, and that is a deeply hollowing and disheartening feeling to live with when you pour your soul into something. To hear this affirmation means the world to us.
Perhaps most importantly of all, growing alongside so many talented people for the past couple of years has forever changed me. I have learned so much about myself, from how I function, to how to navigate an intensive team environment, to what I want to do with my life post-uni, to what it means to flourish in a creative environment with people who actually love and respect each other and our mission. I love my team so bloody much it makes my heart ache. It’s been such a privilege to work, laugh, cry, create, argue, make up, dance, and create with ten of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and I hope to keep tending to the embers of these friendships that I know have only just begun.
I’ve glazed some of my team already but I need to shout the rest of my beautiful babies out: Zara, our Features Editor, is one of the funniest, most engaging, thoughtful and honest writers I know, and have written some of my favourite pieces we’ve published over the last couple of years. Kimia, my social media baddie, revamped our socials this year but beyond that, I know she is going to go so far, miss lawyer. Liv has been a fabulous Creative Writing editor and writer and the single most reliable person on our team this year (#goat). Mannix was truly an all rounder this year, editing, designing, writing, and providing us with all the giggles ever.
And finally, my Latin American twin, Mayela Dayeh, the ying to my yang, I adore you. You have been the best Managing Editor I could have ever asked for and the only reason I didn’t completely crash and burn this year. You are so incredible and I can’t wait for what the future has in store for us (big things coming… watch this space).
This version of Vertigo is not quite what I imagined it’d look like when I picked up 2021’s Glitch, my first ever copy of the masthead, before I graduated high school. Nonetheless, 17 year old me would be so ridiculously cheesed that I had the honour of running the magazine that cemented my decision of studying at UTS, and that my team and I made it our own. And it fucking rocked.
I need to stop writing now, because my shirt is soaked in tears. This is a bittersweet farewell. I am so proud. I love you, Vertigo.
Farewell <3
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