Leadership

Since taking on the role of Editor-in-Chief in April, my computer now feels like it belongs to a magazine director. The cutouts of random students that overflows my downloads on my MacBook, the countless Google Docs filled with notes and content, my desktop filled with screenshots used to create slideshows. Over 90% of the things that go on on my computer are related to the creation of the yearbook, and I take pride in that.

Here are some resources my two co-EiCs and I made for Volume 64:

Trainings

For Volume 64, around 50 new staff members joined Regulus in September (although not everyone stayed), and to give these people an introduction/lesson on the three categories (design, content, and photography), we held a mandatory training session in September and October.

All training slideshows are linked in our schoology (a site our school uses, kind of like Google Classroom) resources page for any staff who want to take a look at it.

Photography training - regulus yearbook

Since I am an EiC in photography, I teamed up with the photography managing editors to create a slideshow that goes over basic photography skills.

We held multiple trainings so that people who couldn't make it to one could still come and learn about it.

This is a screenshot of a slideshow Mia (co-EiC) and I created for design training. This was created in January because we were desperate for design training: the spreads that were turned in were missing a lot of key elements (ex. not following our style guide).

Slides for Meetings

Since September, we have created many slideshows on canva.com, which we present to our staff at the beginning of our meetings. We used slideshows at the beginning of the year more frequently than recently, when there were still things that we had to let our staff know, including the theme and structure of the book. We also had a lot of information that we had to get across, and we found it easy to make a slideshow and show it to our staff as we talked about it, hoping for better understanding.

Below are screenshots of some of our sideshows.

Resources

"Where can you find our resources? ON OUR SCHOOLOGY RESOURCES PAGE"

As an EiC, I cannot stress this enough. Everything a staff will need to create a spread is in our schoology resources page.

Let me take you through it.

The resources page not only has our ladder and our Volume 64 website but also links to things like the school's athletic calendar for people working on sports pages and needing to get photos.

Honestly, I don't know if any of our staff actually use this page to their advantage (I would guess that maybe a few people do), but this resources page serves as a place for us EiCs to store everything in one place, so it's not completely useless.

Now, let's dive into some of these resources. I promise it won't be boring.

visit our website!

Regulus V.64 Website

Usually, publications use their website as a tool to promote their content. But as a yearbook, we ultimately needed people to buy the book. We didn't need people to access our website (although we could lead people into buying our book through our website, it really isn't the ideal way since, on top of creating the book, we'll have to create content to post on the website).

This website was created with the intention that it will greatly help our staff.

How to

Our website has four how-to sections: Design, Content, Photography, and Access our resources.

Each section covers the basics with videos, screenshots, and writing.

designscreenrecording.MOV

Design

This section is the section that I mainly created. With each tutorial, I added a photo or a screen recording of how to do something so that it is visually easy to understand. I only included the very basic skills though because if I started making tutorials for every trick, it is neverending.

Screen Recording 2024-12-24 at 3.24.35 PM.mov

Content

My co-EiC Tali created this section. I honestly think she did such a nice job on this page. Things like the format of a caption is something we want to keep consistent throughout our book, and this page makes clear the format we are using.

Screen Recording 2024-12-24 at 3.26.17 PM.mov

Photography

Our photography managing editor, Polina, created this section. It goes through the usage of our Canon camera. I wish that more staff would refer to this page instead of coming up to me or Polina and asking me to adjust the settings for them; they won't learn anything if they don't try to figure it out on their own.

Access Our Resources

Doesn't it seem pretty simple? Accessing our resources page doesn't seem like it takes that much effort.

But contrasting the EiC's effort and hope that this page will help our staff, none of our staff seemed to use our resources page.

So, my co-EiC Mia created this section out of frustration. And I'm glad she made this page. It's about time that our staff appreciate our effort into making this page and actually start using it.

Style Guide

Here lives the style guide of Volume 64.

Our style guide is the ultimate rule book. Either follow our style guide and create spreads or leave Regulus immediately.

We are strictly following this style guide throughout our book. It gives the book consistency and brings pages with different content together into one book.

Fun fact about me: One of my pet peeves is when I see a font or color out of our style guide.

Design Style Guide

We have three main things in our design style guide.

Fonts

Although there are tons of fonts we can choose from among the fonts that Walsworth provides us with, we had a general idea of what kind of fonts we wanted to use.

The right top screenshot has the five fonts that the three of us EiCs liked originally (we collected these from Google to use as inspiration).

I was in charge of choosing the fonts from the Walsworth font book, but I ran into a few problems:

It was hard to find fonts that looked similar to the ones we collected for inspo.
When I did manage to find fonts that looked similar enough, the fonts didn't really go together. When they were laid out on the demo spread, it looked... weird and unfit.

So, I started from scratch and just took note of the fonts that I simply liked.

These four fonts on the bottom right made it to the finals:

After a few minutes of discussing with the other two EiCs, we decided on Hello Monday as our headline font.

As for the body font, we wanted a serif font but not too serif and something easily read. Therefore, we chose Times, which is simple yet not too simple.

We struggled with the caption font. We had used Abel as our caption font for Volume 63, and I'm gonna be honest, I didn't know if I liked it. We wanted a San serif font for sure, but scrolling through the font book, there weren't any San serif fonts that were eye-catching.

We ultimately went back to where we came from. We decided to use Abel -it fit the best- but we decided to make the size smaller. One of the things I noticed when I first got the physical copy of Volume 63 was how big everything looked compared to the spreads on screen. This included the caption size. Even if the captions looked small enough on the computer screen, once printed out, they appear so much bigger. Therefore, we set the font size to 6, the smallest size Walsworth handles.

2. Color Palette

The trial-and-error process of choosing our colors for this yearbook was definitely one of the most time-consuming and tedious tasks I did. One thing the editors had in mind was not to include both blue and orange in our color palette. Since our school colors are blue and orange, once we have both those colors in our color palette, like we have in the past years, we tend to use those two colors so often that the whole book was basically blorange.

We generated a few color palettes from Coolers.co, but none of them intrigued us.

I then decided to try out all of the color combinations each palette could have (which you can see with the screenshot below of one of my Canva slides) and tried to see which palette had the biggest potential.

For example, slides 10 and 11 are color combinations of the color palette on slide 6. Overall, they look retro, and they feel too aunty. They don't look fresh. Slides 8 and 9 are color combinations of the color palette on slide 7. It wasn't bad... but I wasn't satisfied either. The colors were kind of dark, and out of the 15 different combinations, only about four or five of them were combinations that I would've been happy to use on a spread.

Slide 12 is where everything came together.

I was too tired to restart and generate a new color palette so I decided to make a new color palette out of the colors we collected through this process. Although I did end up adding a few new colors here and there to try to make a color palette that satisfied me, I ultimately ended with these colors below:

*The Canva color codes are there for anyone who is making an infographic on Canva and needs the same colors as the ones on the color palette.

3. Other Specifics

Here are some other elements we want to have a guide to keep consistent.

Spacings, infographics, and quotes are also things that we want to keep consistent throughout the book. Spacings, especially, are very visible when inconsistent, so it is one of the first things that I look at when a spread is proofed.

Content Style Guide

Our content style guide has only two things, but the content How-to section covers more things.

Name format has always been one of those things where every staff had their own way of writing. So each spread ended with different format names like "Brian Baron (12)", "Senior, Brian Baron," or "Brian Baron, a senior."

So, this year, we decided it was time to decide on one format.

The same goes for the title format, except this was something I added later. Originally, this wasn't in the style guide, but as the first set of spreads were proofed, I noticed the inconsistency of the titles. I think it's one of those things where if you don't notice, it won't bother you, but once you do, you can't help but notice it.

Photography Style Guide

These are also very basic things that everyone should be doing. But it's surprising to see how many people need a reminder to do these simple tasks. All three of these photography style guide elements were added later after I noticed a few spreads missing these subtle yet significant details.

Theme

One of the very first things we established for Volume 64 was the theme. Everything, including the fonts and color palettes, came after the theme.

Our theme is the foundation of our book. It is the baseline of everything—the cover, dividers, and spreads. Everything is in some way connected to and takes us back to the idea that "Every Second Counts."

The theme section of our website covers why the EiCs chose this theme and explains further what we mean by "Every Second Counts."

In the spring of 2024, we started our process of theme-making. The EiCs and MEs (managing editors) got together multiple times and brainstormed what we wanted to feature about our lives as students at Newton South. What was unique about South and its students? How do South students spend their time?

As we brainstormed, it seemed like everyone agreed on one thing: Newton South is set up as such a competitive environment, and everyone is trying their best to exceed expectations. So many students are overachievers, and everyone does a bazillion different activities in their spare time that no one has spare time anymore.

From here, we reached the idea to cover all the different things South students do in their swamped lives, hence "Every Second Counts."

Here are some other resources that we have created for Volume 64:

Ladder

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the ladder is open on my tabs 24/7. There is so much information on this ladder, and we organized it quite well.

The "Official Ladder" page lists the spreads and dividers on each page of our book, along with notes from the EiCs on some of the spreads.
The "Groups" page lists the teams with each team leader and staff member's names. Each staff member is in one of the three positions: Design, content, or photography. Separating our staff into these positions helps me see what groups need more people in terms of positions.
The "Deadlines" page lists the spreads each team is responsible for, along with the deadlines for all of them.
The "Staff Responsibilities" page lists everyone's responsibilities in terms of their position in this volume. The MEs are responsible for either design, content, or photography, and their responsibilities vary depending on their position.
The "Contact Information" page is self-explanatory. It has the EiCs' phone numbers and emails in case any staff wants to contact us but doesn't have our contact information.
The "Fall Sports" and "Winter Sports" page lists all the fall/winter sports teams with their captains (captains are some of the most interviewed people in the sports spread) and home game dates for anyone wanting to go take photos.

Furthermore, we decided to change up our ladder a bit from the past few years.

Every year, our ladder looks very similar. We cover sports, we cover all core subjects, we cover the same clubs (like debate and Asian Student Organization), etc.

We wanted to change that.

For example, instead of giving one full spread to all core subjects, we decided to have spreads that could cover the core subjects differently. The Projects and Labs spread is an example of this. Students complete countless projects and labs during the school year in so many different classes, not only in science. This spread will help cover what goes on in different core classes without tilting our spreads "English" or "Science."

Regulus Yearbook: Volume 64 Ladder (2024-2025)

Checklist Before Proofing

This is a Google form that we created for one person per group to fill out before proofing their spreads.

The questions require our staff to look over their spread once again and check to see if they have the basic elements right in their spreads. These "basic elements" include things like having a caption for each photo and making sure the spacings are correct.

The EiCs made this in hopes that when a spread is proofed, we don't see any missing "basic elements". We got far too many spreads proofed in the first deadline that didn't have these "basic elements," and we thought that these were things that we shouldn't even have to be correcting.

And last but not least....

YRBK Milestones

The EiCs have shared notes on the iPhone notes app that lists our accomplishments on the yearbook, starting from the day we became the EiC.

Not only is it a fun way to capture our chaotic life as EiCs, but it also captures....

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