Design
Creating Content Virtually
At the end of our portrait section, we have a feature page for each class. As a freshman in 2020, I was assigned to finishing the freshman portrait section and designing the feature page. I chose to do a This or That page for the end of the section, but this proved difficult when we couldn't hunt people down and ask them these questions.
Sports Pages
I was in charge of a lot of our templates for the book for the past few years, and this was one of the sports pages that I worked on. I would change a few things about the design, but I think matching the color of the page with the color of boats and uniforms helps elevate this page.
Chrono Pages
Our chrono sections have always been pretty strong in my opinion because there is always something happening at our school. We didn't have pink as one of our colors for the book, but we had a red that we tinted down to match the color of the girl's beret to elevate the design on the page.
Content Driven Design
Our staff has been super great about getting pictures and content for the book this year, from hunting people down day after day to interview them, to showing up to sporting events to get pictures. We use the templates I created at the beginning of the year for our sports pages as a base for how we want it to look, but our content drives the size of the mod and where it is on the page.
The Value of Redesigning
During the NSPA Conference in Boston, I attended a redesign seminar, and when the teacher assigned us to redesign one of the pages in our yearbook, I knew this page needed it. It was supposed to be a feature page, but the competing dominant mods were confusing for viewers, so I redesigned it in a way that made it clear which mod was dominant. There are still things I would move around but I think this page made a huge improvement from where it was.
Keeping Up with Trends
When one of our staff members came up with the idea to do an eras feature page as an homage to the internet trend created by Taylor Swift, we told them to get on it immediately. They found a lot of people to cover with the page and the content was amazing. They found a template to put their content into but it didn't quite fit the theme. Before our final deadline, I found some inspiration online and was able to rework the page to match our theme and appear more cohesive.
Covering School Culture
Our school is located in a hub of diversity, and our annual pre-winter break multicultural assembly emulates this. As one of the big events of the school year, I wanted to design it in a way that made people stop and appreciate our culture when they go through the book. I drew on inspiration from magazines, worked closely with our photographers for the pictures we needed and when I finished the page, I felt very happy with how it turned out.