The Loyola Phoenix App — Bringing Campus Journalism to Mobile
The Loyola Phoenix mobile app is Loyola University Chicago's first-ever dedicated reading experience for its independent student newspaper. I built it from the ground up in React Native with Expo, integrating the newspaper's existing WordPress backend via REST API to deliver articles, photos, and multimedia content in a fast, native mobile interface — bringing campus journalism to where students already are: their phones. The app is currently pending launch due to ongoing legal disputes between the Phoenix and the university over editorial independence.
From Concept to Code: Design, Challenges & My Role
As the sole developer and designer on the project, I owned every stage of the process — from wireframing the user experience in Figma to writing and testing the production code. The design was built around the habits of college readers: clean article layouts optimized for skimming, intuitive navigation between sections, and a visual identity consistent with the Phoenix's existing brand. One of the core challenges was working with WordPress's REST API to reliably fetch and render dynamic content — handling edge cases like missing images, varying article formats, and paginated feeds in a way that felt seamless to the end user. Building as a one-person team also meant making constant prioritization calls, balancing feature depth with shipping something polished and stable.
