Leadership & Organization as co-editor-in-chief:
Lessons:
In pre-pandemic times, it's custom to have new staff members attend a four hour intro yearbook lesson before school starts. However, this year this took place on zoom. My fellow second year designers and I prepared some resources about the basics of design for new staff members. This specific lesson walks through the basic process of creating a design with examples. |
Deadline Flow:
This year, the EIC team decided to have 10 deadlines and release the book in the summer as opposed to the previous years with 6 deadlines and a spring supplement. We believed this to be the best model for this school year given the craziness and uncertainty of the virus. We thought it would absolutely necessary to be gathering coverage up until deadline 10 on May 17th, to accurately represent the entirety of this school year. |
Deadline Recaps:
It is essential that the staff has time to reflect and learn from each deadline. This is why the EICs and create deadline recap presentations to point out the pros and cons of each deadline. It is also important that we are constantly shouting out good work, leadership, and communication, which is why we include the "things we love" section on each presentation. The presentations are something we try to make as interactive as possible to encourage staff members to participate and have fun in class. |
Editing:
Although I am not a design editor this year, I have helped with the process. I also created a design checklist to assist designer editors in ensuring all spreads are in tip-top technical shape. |
When editing spreads, I like to show before and after pictures of the bigger edits I make. This way, designers have the change to learn how to improve their design. |
The Ladder:
When making decisions about how many pages we wanted per section for this year, we decided to leave a lot of leniency and leeway for change in the ladder. We also decided to include a Covid section which consists of 10 spreads, one per deadline. It's primary goal is to focus on capturing the impact of COVID-19 on the school year as well as the pandemic's effects on students' daily lives.Allowing for this type of flexibility has been beneficial to the uncertainty of this year. As we have been getting a feel for which sections entail more coverage, we've been able to reallocate pages to sections to represent this school year as accurately as possible. |