20 gift ideas for less than $50

After talking with the reporter about the gift guide she’d created, I realized that the price point was what differentiated it from past gift guides. I brainstormed 10 or 15 different ways to approach the story and began leaning toward doing something with the headline I’d written. (This also allowed me to avoid doing anything that resembled what other sections of the paper were doing with their gift guides.) Creating a tree shape transmitted holiday right away without specifying Christmas per se, which I liked. I also didn’t want to use typical Christmas colors, so I set the snow-covered “tree” against a night sky, allowing me to capture the spirit of the season and put the headline front and center.