Editing, Leadership and Team Building

Canva is my Best Friend

Canva became one of my best friends. Specifically, as a designer, Canva became a way to unleash my creativity and make the management process more enjoyable. I use Canva to create slideshows such as design trainings, upcoming deadlines, reminders, or plans for theme ideas. It is a great way to organize my ideas and create a way for members to easily understand the concepts and ideas that the Editors and I are trying to portray. 

The Ladder

I know I said that the website was the backbone of Regulus, but realistically, the ladder is something Editors and staff can't live without. The EiCs and I spent hours organizing and planning out this document with deadlines, teams, additional notes, and much more. It lists all the spreads we are covering in the book, and who they are assigned to. We also included a list of expectations for our editors, team leaders, and overall staff to ensure all members know exactly what is expected of them. 

What happens after Proof?

In previous years, team leaders would proof their spreads, and then the editors would go in and change things to how they like. However, as team leaders, we would notice these changes but never understand WHY they were taking place. Therefore now as editors, our goal is to allow our staff to improve and LEARN from their mistakes without us just taking control with no explanation. I will always remember this one phrase I heard at the CSPA convention, "It's not about how good of editors YOU are, it's about how well the next year's editors will be." 

At the beginning of the year, we started with over 50 new members in the club and were overwhelmed by the number of people who were interested in joining. However, this also meant that we had a lot of new members who had no clue how to use our design program. Therefore, we were simultaneously completing trainings, as groups were completing their spreads. We wanted our staff to produce spreads that were visually pleasing, shared interesting stories, and matched our theme. So, to ensure this, we created a feedback Google document with all the 14 spreads from the first assignment and used this as a checklist for groups. As a design editor, I created a feedback list for the design and provided kind words at the top to encourage the team. 

Our staff found this incredibly helpful, and we were satisfied with the improvement we were seeing.

Becoming Leaders During Important Events

During the conferences, the editors and I created a large list of notes to document any theme ideas, editor strategies, and much more. This was a great way to organize our thoughts, and it helped a lot during the process of establishing our theme.

Utilizing the Summer Time

The EiCs and I have a countless number of planning documents and notes that we have gathered during our meetings in the summer to prepare for the upcoming school year. It ranges from to-do lists to theme ideas to group assignments.