The Enthymion
Designed and redesigned by me, Enthymion Editor-in-Chief and first-year staffer
You read that right
This is my first year on yearbook staff, and it has truly been a doozy. I did not apply for the position of Enthymion Editor-In-Chief but I was offered it after I didn't fit for the position of Emery Editor-In-Chief. While it is somewhat unfair to give the EIC position to someone who barely worked on yearbook before, there was only one truly qualified candidate for the yearbook EIC position and that is Garrett Jin, my partner EIC.
Mrs. Badalamente advises both the newspaper and yearbook so it was not just that the spot needed to be filled, Mrs. Badalamente knew I would be right for the job after overseeing my work as online Editor-in-Chief. I never really imagined myself in this position but I love it regardless.
Building this theme and spending hours designing yearbook pages is therapeutic yet productive for me. This book is the best one that Huron has ever produced because I have learned from the mistakes of our previous yearbook. My love and admiration for Huron and my fellow classmates has built this theme from the ground up. I also could not be more grateful to Ms. Ava Butzu and Mrs. Pam Bunka for pulling me into this world and teaching me most of what I know about yearbook design.
You HAVE to see
"See it to believe it"
This year's theme is "See it to believe it." Believe it or not but I actually thought of this theme after hearing it in a Harry Styles song. The line is actually "You gotta see it to believe it; Sky never looked so blue" from the song Canyon Moon. I know song lyrics are typically frowned upon in the yearbook world but this was essentially just the spark that caught on.
By being a student at Huron it is very clear how wonderful and inventive we are. We have so many academic options including a diverse CTE program (we have everything from cooking to school store management to automobile tech services), the International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement, as well as award winning music and art departments. These are just a few of my favorite opportunities but we also bring in national awards from our Business Professionals of America, Future Health Professionals, Math Olympiad, Science Olympiad teams. Lastly, students at Huron do so much not even related to school that continued to amaze me, this includes (but is not limited to) working almost full time hours, going to states for sports, and just working to further their pursuit of knowledge. "See it to believe it" represents us because none of these things are immediately clear, and our feats are so amazing that you have to see it with your own eyes to truly understand.
This theme idea was designed over the summer and was furthered through the MIPA summer workshops. However, this theme added on another layer when we realized that the beginning of the school year would be completely virtual. When I look back at my yearbook in 20 years, I am going to see how amazing Huron students are, but also how crazy this year was. Kids in 20 years will be astonished that we had a full semester online.
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I hope that all of these ideas are evident within the color and design elements of the theme. This year has thrown a wrench in a lot of things, but that just makes this yearbook better.
Theme design: color blocking and the cover
If we are working to pull back layers with our reporting, we needed to represent that layering. We decided to use color blocks within our design to create this effect.
Left: This is the first version of our cover. We were originally going to have the color blocks over the people to demonstrate the "peeling" of the layers. but later switched to behind the subjects at the suggestion of Jostens designer Jeff Mofitt who commented that the blocks in front obscure the faces. The photos used here are just stock but the implemented version is below. With the newer version, we included our actual color palette (we had changed a few colors since the creation of the original cover).
While our cover may look extremely different from each of the redesigns, we always keep the general ideas. The "See it to believe it" logo was designed by my fellow EIC Garrett Jin and I worked with most of the layout.
The "FINAL" but not
My adviser told us that many schools were struggling with cover photos this year. Many have subsequently moved to a photo-less cover and we followed suit. I love this cover. I think it is beautiful and fully encompasses what we are doing with the yearbook. With the blocks somewhat transparent but also layered, we demonstrate how Huron students have many layers but come together to make something new. This cover completely represents everything we do within the book (demonstrated below). We are hard workers which is why we are willing to make such a drastic change.
The final cover, finally
To the left was our final cover. I use the word "was" because seven days before the cover was due was when we scrapped this idea. The main thing we still had to do with this was move the color block for the bottom left photo to behind the subject and then be done. The closer to this deadline was when we were all feeling a little queasy. On the night of December 4, I was in a hotel in Ohio getting prepared to take the SAT the following day. When my adviser called Garrett and I, she said what we were all feeling: we did not like the cover. The cover idea was beautiful but in times of COVID with limited photo opportunities, we did not have what we wanted. And so, we moved over to the cover you see below the almost final cover.
Welcome inside (the book)
For more spreads, check out the yearbook design portion of my design tab.
The original opening copy
The opening copy (in progress)
I am the "lead designer" on the opening spread pages as well as the dividers. With this, we have not actually finalized our theme copy. The pages to the left may be missing a few pieces of content but demonstrate the overall design of our pages. These pages obviously take inspiration from the original pages but also reflect everything with our book.
The slideshow to the left has all of our original theme copy pages. These photos were stock photos as well but were meant to potentially represent what the actual photos could be. With these pages, our biggest focus was to cohesively including the theme copy and also represent our cover design (this was with the first cover we designed). While I really appreciate these designs, they were completely overhauled. After we changed the cover to be more like what the inside of the book was really like, we redesigned. I have designed over half of all of our current yearbook pages and I have made redesigns on all of the pages. I am a perfectionist in this way but it is because I am committed to this book.
Dividers and conquer
All about our section dividers. They have come a long way and still have some places to go.
The original dividers
The original dividers were definitely ok, but ultimately they were somewhat boring. After looking through lots of yearbook design books (I look a lot at the Jostens Lookbook, the Balfour book, the Pacemaker masterclass books, as well as Walsworth's Content Creator book) I saw that many dividers use different forms of storytelling. Yearbooks don't only use stories to tell stories. Captions, quotes, and other types of text can also tell a story which is what inspired the updated dividers.
The new and improved dividers
These dividers are more bright and vibrant. They still include all of our theme elements but also are very unique. The dividers are not done because I am still working through what the dividers should represent and also with the content.
Considering diversity
In terms of representing the student body ethnically, The Enthymion editorial board has somewhat better representation. On our editor staff we have one South Asian (me!), one person of East Asian descent, four Black editors, and three White editors. "By the numbers" we have a good spread but we still do not represent the Latinx community. Within our staff overall, we do have Latinx representation. We have so much diversity over a staff of 75 and I have no doubts that we will be able to represent everyone.
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Within yearbook, the stories that we tell are typically based upon fact and are within the "feature" category. I do not worry as much about bias for yearbook but we still consider and check every story. The yearbook also has a close to equal spread of men and women. On our editorial board we have five male editors and four female editors. This helps as we are ultimately trying to reach everyone at Huron and with a even spread we are more likely to get to this goal.