2020 yearbook

2019/2020

Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Nikon D3300

My role: Creative director, lead photographer

The highlight of my years in high school was definitely being the leader for and contributing to the my school's yearbook. For both my grade 11 and grade 12 years, I lead a group of 5-10 people to create two separate books, the most recent of which I'm most proud of. The book came out in 2020, so of course the theme had to be based on the year. I didn't want to do something basic like "2020 vision" so I decided to base the theme on the saying "The future is now." I designed the cover in October 2021 not knowing that everything would be shutdown 5 months later, but the hopeful theme found its way through whole way through the book, whether it was in colour or shape. This cover ended up being in the top 5 in Canada for best yearbook covers of 2020.

I identify a lot of my design style through the use of colour and shape. For each section divider, I created custom designs by combing some pictures I took and particular shapes to create a sense of movement.

Along with designing, I was also leading our crew of photographers and was able to attend some events throughout the year and edit some cool pictures from them.

Most of my time went into leading the team, helping design the layouts for each page, and selecting the best images of the thousands we took to display in the book. I split our team into people responsible for sections and was supervising/helping each of them to keep a cohesive look across the book.

Since the book was still in development when COVID-19 lockdowns started in March, we had to get creative with how we filled up a full quarter of the book. I came up with a section called "Today in Awesome" where we made up some pages about how COVID happened and a memory section for people to look back on later in life.

This entire book was an eight-month, 260-page labour of love and I'm really proud that my team and I were able to pull it off.