Statement

My specific role as Editor-in-Chief was to choose the visual elements we as a staff wanted to showcase throughout the book to drive consistency and proper coverage of our theme. Our theme was “If You’re Wondering What It’d Be Like.” We wanted to showcase all of the realities – the celebrations and challenges - of life as a high school student and staff member of Brighton High School during the year of the pandemic.

While selecting fonts, I wanted to choose fonts that would complement one another, yet still have some contrast to match the vibe of our yearbook. We chose Chantilly Light Hand and Regular to highlight copy, captions, quotes, names and smaller words in headlines to showcase the informative and direct tone of sharing our school’s stories. We chose the second font, News Gothic DemiBold, to emphasize large words in headlines and reader entry points in copy and caption kickers. I found that by changing the color, capitalization and weights of the font, the words became emphasized to create a strong, bold feeling while still being easy to read.

To help readers engage in the copy blocks of main stories, I noticed in a few magazines that they changed the widths of their columns of writing. On each spread within the book, I made all the columns except one the same width. Within these columns, I chose one quote to pull out for emphasis that was two sizes bigger (12 point font) and made it a different color (white, black or pink) depending on the page. This style of copy complimented the big, bold words emphasized in the headline above or below it.

With different photographs and photo packages, I chose to highlight them in some sort of way. A trend I saw in a lot of magazines I was pulling inspiration from was photo packages with overlapping white outlined photos with a mix of large and small scale widths. This allowed me to pull the photo packages together to create room for captions. I also made the choice sometimes with these specific photos to turn them into a duotone. This emphasized the image more because it had a story behind it that the reader may wonder about and would learn about by reading the caption. I also used a duotone color to highlight different cutouts particularly on specialty spreads and profiles to highlight the subject. I selected one specific photo to be in black and white to draw a certain emphasis of importance whether it was in a modular story or a dominant photo interacting with a headline or word treatment. The black and white photo also interacted a majority of the time with a duotone to highlight the color and contrast of the images.

Another trend I noticed by some graphic designers was overlapping and cutting words into photos and subjects that were partially cut out. I included these trends on several spreads to add additional levels of white space between elements and to draw specific attention to words or headlines. I found that this allowed me to design with more white space making it more appealing to readers and connecting each element as a unified package. With these various cutouts, they sometimes interacted with various headline treatments where one particular letter would either be on top or behind the subject.

As far as color and graphic elements, I made the decision to step away from our dominant school color of red and found more vibrant colors like pink and black because they nicely complimented the duotones and black and white photography. I included small gray and black boxes to add more color to our spreads but to highlight certain words or names. With a small gray box, it served as a reader entry point with a few words of the lead, and it also highlighted a few words that interacted with our headlines. Lastly, I added drop shadows to larger black boxes to offset the box with the color it was attached to.

I wanted to include another reader entry point on spreads that highlighted a specific person’s quote to help us tell stories. These pull-out quotes sometimes sat next to a full cutout photo, cut into a dominant photo, or sat within a space on a spread between elements. To emphasize a pull-out quote on a that was partially placed on top of every dominant photo. The quote stood out because the student’s name was in all capital letters in a black box with the quote placed beneath it.

By encompassing all of these elements throughout the yearbook, our theme was reinforced on each page, pages became more pleasing to the eye, and the book became more uniform and flowed together better due to consistent elements on every page. I am really proud of the overall look and feel of this book and the verbal theme really came together because of the visual elements.

*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.