Design Statement

When Ellie (my co-editor) and I divided up specific roles this year, I chose to be the individual who would be in charge of making all decisions regarding design. Our theme was "And How 'Bout We Find Out."  Our high school has gone through major changes. We moved from quarters to semesters while also going from a four period block day to a seven period every day schedule. Our athletics moved into the new Front Range League with teams that were going to be tougher to beat. With the building of a new CTE Center in the middle of campus, construction caused changes to how we entered the building, took away parking spaces, to get to class on time and was sometimes noisy. We wanted all of these changes because it was going to make things better. We wanted to find out how those changes would make BHS even better.

As we chose the visual elements we as a staff wanted to showcase throughout the book to drive consistency and coverage of our theme, we knew we wanted to experiment with fonts and large text. While selecting the perfect font, I wanted to choose fonts that would complement one another, yet still have some contrast to match the vibe of our yearbook. While looking at a specific magazine ad on Behance, I emailed the author of the magazine and they shared with me they used Roc Grotesk. Luckily, it was an Adobe font, so we chose it. We used Roc Grotesk Bold for our main headline words. We then used Roc Grotesk Condensed Bold for subheadlines, big pull-out quotes, and caption kickers. I then chose AHJ Urbano regular for main copy and AHJ Urbano Condensed for captions to compliment the Roc Grotesk font.  

Our cover dictated all of the visual element choices. I found an ad that read "And Without Expectation" on BeHance. I loved the type treatment of the gigantic one word and how the other words had a shade of color behind it. Since the word "AND" was really driving the organization of our book along with the coverage, I wanted to emphasize that word so I made it huge. Then I added the rest of the phrase below while interacting with the word. This is where I added the shade of color behind the word that resembled a drop shadow. I did like the color yellow from the ad; however, that is our school rival's color, and we didn't want to use school colors, so we chose green. I wanted a photo to interact with it, so we found a soccer photo that provided enough idea of what is happening, but you would need to go into the book to read (find) more about it. I chose to make it black and white because I didn't want anything to take away from the typegraphy, specifically the word "AND."

When it came down to designing photo packages, a trend I saw in a lot of magazines I was pulling inspiration from was photo packages with close register and sometimes one photo overlapping with a white outline. This allowed me to pull the photo packages together to create room for captions. Every dominant photo though had to interact with the headline treatment like on the cover, so while selecting photos, our staff needed to choose one where the subject could interact with the typography.  We didn't want to make every dominant photo black and white, so we chose to do that on theme pages and certain specialty spreads. 

Finally I really wanted to design with color. I loved the overlapping of green and black on the cover that I wanted to continue that throughout the book. On thematic spreads, we chose to stay with the green and black. Throughout the book, we pulled color from photos where atleast two colors were chosen. 

*Note: The following spreads will show the design choices I made in the book. Click on the spread photo or caption title link to view the image in a browser for zooming capabilities.