Creating this yearbook was one of the most creative, challenging, and rewarding projects I have ever done. During this project, I designed the theme and cover of the book, managed a large group of like-minded peers, worked with Jostens representatives, designed many pages within the book, and edited it from cover to cover. This project pushed me to become more comfortable with critiquing and being critiqued as well as improved my management, leadership, and design skills.

This was the cover that inspired my design. I found it on Pinterest in grade 11 and was initially drawn to it because it was so bright. I also liked how the tiger was made of negative space rather than painted directly on. 

Above is my first sketch of my cover. Our school's mascot is a redhawk so I put it in the place of the tiger. I didn't want to make my cover rainbow so I chose to use purple and blue watercolour instead. 

At this point in my process, I was considering using the theme "Together We Are One" if I couldn't think of one myself.

After browsing on Pinterest for further inspiration, I came across a book that was bound sideways. This opened up new doors to my creativity because this orientation would've  balanced the hawk cover better. The only issue was whether or not the yearbook company would be able to print books in this orientation and how difficult it would be to design pages. After asking the company, they said it would be too difficult and I was back at square one.

I quickly decided that I did not want to copy another school's theme for my grade 12 book so my main priority became thinking of a theme that hasn't been done before. I was talking to my grade 11 yearbook advisor at the end of the year and she mentioned the theme idea "Outside the Box" and I loved it. I could tie in the watercolour and have it overlapping with the border. Above is my first sketch of the cover.

During the summer before grade 12 I finalized the theme and cover. Above is my miniature draft of the cover.

Above is my basic plan for the book. It lists what I wanted the cover to look like, design elements to carry through, and what we are going to add/remove from the year before.

This is the final cover! A Jostens designer created the cover but I worked alongside a Jostens representative to plan it using my miniature cover as reference. 

The theme "Outside the Box" represents the idea that each person is individual and no one fits 'inside a box'. In this book my goal was to highlight and appreciate how different each student in our school community is (the complete opposite of the previous theme concept). Watercolour worked well with this idea because no two splatters are alike. The design element I chose to carry throughout is the white border from the cover. This added a sense of unity to the book and tied it all together.

This is one of the first pages of the yearbook and it is used to explain the theme. In all of our past yearbooks, we've explained the theme in a paragraph or poem. When creating this page, I wanted to make it more visually pleasing than a plain paragraph so I created a more abstract representation of the theme by answering the question "What does it mean to think outside the box?". The colour palette I chose for this page is the same colour palette as the yearbook's cover.

In the beginning few pages it is especially important to establish unity throughout the book. I designed the Table of Contents spread so that the reader would have a sneak peak of each divider. I also added borders to each section to continue the main thematic design. I used black and gray for the text so the spread would not look too busy and to make sure the focus was on the photos and page numbers.

When designing layouts for photo heavy spreads, balance is key. When the reader first glances at the page, they are drawn into the dominant photo which by itself holds a crucial element of the event, the costumes, as well as the border continuing the theme. The four modules on the left and right of the spread are flipped creating asymmetrical balance that is appealing to the eye. White space is also an important factor when it comes to balance. The eyeline at the top quarter of the page and the white space behind the headline and caption support this idea. 

I chose to use red and black for the supporting colours on the page (ex. headline, colour box, details etc.). This made the reds and blacks in the photos pop out giving the page a more pirate-y feel.

A headline has the power to make or break a page. In the spread above, my goal was to create a headline that related to both the dominant photo and the event itself. During the event, it was poring rain outside and in the dominant photo the students are "making it rain" during a dance off which all inspired the headline. The caption to the left of the dominant photo further explains the headline so those who did not attend understand it as well.

We have a few designated pages within the book to be creative and make something that is both interesting for the reader and continues the concept of the theme. This year I chose to design a page centred around feminism and equality which was, and continues to be, a topic that is very relevant in the world. The idea of individualism is very apparent in this spread, highlighting the people that risked standing apart from the norm for what they believed in. This continues the concept of "Outside the Box". I connected this broad concept to our much smaller school community by asking students "what is feminism to you?". A student even provided a photo of her at the Vancouver Woman's March. 

When I was designing the spread I focused on colour and structure. The colour palette in this spread is inspired from the colours in some of the major images giving the spread unity. It is also laid out in a modular style. The survey is a single module, dominant and secondary photos are another, and so on. This gives the page structure and makes it easy for the reader to comprehend.

This double-page spread is placed at the end of one grade and the beginning of another. Similar to the theme page above, the page on the left is the grade survey page where we ask each grade a question related to the theme of the book. This year we asked "what makes you different?". When I was first developing the theme of the book, this was the first page that I planned out. The whole idea of the page is that each student is unique. this is why they wrote their answers in their own writing. The section below highlights the significant events that took place the year that this grade was born. 

A challenged I faced while designing these two very different pages was designing them so that they looked like a spread and not two separate pages sitting beside each other. I chose to do this by using a dark monochromatic colour palette as well as using the theme's white borders.