Embedded Files
EiC Meetings
EiC Meetings
It is not a stretch to say that my Sunday morning is taken over by the yearbook. Once in a couple of weeks, the three of us EiCs meet at Tali's house to work on the book. As we munch on Trader Joe's Takis, we try our best to dedicate that morning completely to work on the yearbook so that we can meet our deadlines.
Our EiC meeting started on Aug 15th, when it was time to gather and solidify our theme and decide on other design elements/book's overall structure. Since then, we have had a total of 10 meetings, each about 4-5 hours.
To be honest, I can't explain what we do during meetings because we are all over the place. Some of us are texting people about an interview or texting staff about getting their spreads done, while some of us are trying to figure out portrait page design. Regardless, we are all on Walsworth as if there is no tomorrow.
Feedback
Feedback
Let me tell you one thing: I did not expect to be doing this in September.
This is a Google document of the feedback from each EiC on each team's spread.
When we got the first round of proofed spreads, as much as we wanted to go into the spreads ourselves and edit things, we wanted the team leaders and staff to know why we wanted to change things.
I remember, for Volume 63, I would proof a spread, and the EiCs would go in and change things without a heads-up or explanation, and I got very frustrated with that. To not repeat what I got frustrated with, we decided to make a feedback document so that the staff in each team could fix things themselves and learn from it.
The feedbacks are split into three categories: design, content, and photography. I mainly gave feedback on photography and design since that is my specialty. At some points, through giving feedback, I had to be harsh on people, having to deny someone's creative idea just because it did not fit our theme and the rest of the book. Yet, this step was necessary, even if I had to be mean, to make a book that was cohesive and fun to look at.
Below is the before (top) and After (bottom) feedback and help from the EiCs for some of our spreads.
Sports Score Boards
Sports Score Boards
I created this spreadsheet to keep track of the scores for EVERY SINGLE sports team at Newton South. For the spring supplement for Volume 63, I was in charge of the sports photo pages, and I decided to put scoreboards on the spreads. Even though adding scoreboards adds a ridiculous amount of work, it helps to capture more about each sports season.
Since I was in charge of the sports photo pages in the spring, naturally, I became in charge of the sports photo pages for our new volume (Vol. 64), too.
The spreadsheet has all sports' teams (including JV and freshman teams), their opponent of their game, whether they won or lost, and the scores.
To collect this vast amount of information, I check this site, run by our athletics director, once in every couple of days. If there were any updates in any of the team's scores, I added them to the spreadsheet. Once their season is over and I have all of their scores, all I have to do is copy and paste the information onto the spreadsheet.
Now, here is the tricky part. The site I mentioned earlier isn't consistent. Our athletic director is only able to update the scores if the coaches for each sport send in their scores. Therefore, the amount of information available on this site is heavily dependent on whether or not the coaches send in the information. This is why I had to personally reach out to some of the coaches and ask for the scores after their season ended.
Another problem was that the scores for the JV and freshman teams were rarely updated. When I asked for the scores from the coaches, most of them replied with "Sorry, I didn't keep track of the scores," which was not helpful at all. This is the reason why the JV and freshman teams don't have scoreboards.
Flowing Portrait Pages
Flowing Portrait Pages
Another big task I did for Volume 64 was flowing portrait pages. For each grade (09-12), I had to determine the size of the portraits (how many portrait pictures were going to be on one page) according to how many students there were in each grade and how many pages we had.
For example, since we had more pages for senior portraits, I made them so that the portraits are bigger (meaning there are fewer portrait pictures per page).
The hard thing about flowing portraits is that once you find a mistake, you have to flow them all over again. For instance, we had a couple of non-seniors who were somehow labeled as seniors in the Walsworth program. When I spotted it, I had to go and manually change the person's grade to the correct one, and then I had to reflow the entire senior page. In total, I probably reflowed it more than 8 times.
↑ Final design
The struggle didn't end here.
The struggle didn't end here.
If you think reflowing portrait pages is the hardest part, you should have experience getting content for them.
The left is a document that my co-EiC, Tali, created.
We assigned our staff to interview and take a photo of five students in their grade for the portrait page cutouts. Realistically thinking, this simple task takes a maximum of 15 minutes of our staff's lives. But did our staff complete their task? I would say maybe four people did.
This wouldn't have been a problem if our deadline was coming up in a week. But unfortunately, it was, and we needed to send in the portrait pages.
We initially recruited volunteers to work on the portrait pages via the Google form we sent to our staff. Based on that Google form, we created a group chat with the EiCs and the f. The text to the left was sent out two weeks and a few days before our February deadline. We thought it was more than enough time for them to get interviews and lay them on the spreads.
In short, only two people out of eight in this group chat did their job.
*For context, our deadline was on February 11th.
So who laid out most of the pages? Me!!
The annoying part about this portrait page design is that the task itself is simple, but it is heavily time-consuming. I have to download the photos from Google Drive, convert the photo format from HEIC to JPEG, upload them to Walsworth, remove the background of the photo to make a cutout, and type in the question + answer. This whole process times 3 or 4 per spread. There were 24 spreads. I thought I was going to lose my mind near the end.
But we did it!!!
But we did it!!!
And that's all that matters
And that's all that matters
As I keep repeating throughout this portfolio, one of our biggest goals was to meet every deadline. We were at great risk of breaking that goal with the February deadline. So, of course, I was extremely proud of our hours and hours worth of work.
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