This yearbook was the first major project I've been able to work on almost exclusively by myself. Aside from the ads and a few assets created by another intern, this project was built by solely me, from the ground up. It was incredibly fun and interesting to be able to work with, and under other designers.While this project was almost entirely my work and ideas, it was crucial to my success that I was able to bounce ideas off the other design interns, and get feedback from the designer supervising me.
Experiences Canada is a non-profit that facilitates cross-country exchanges for Canadian teens. This project is something I was insanely excited to be able to do, as travel is something I really enjoy, and was lucky enough to be able to experience when i was younger.
Experiences Canada uses these yearbooks as marketing and advertising, not just as a souvenier for the kids. Their yearbooks are used to show potential shareholders, sponsors, and future interested students & teachers what their organization does. To this end, the yearbook had to be interesting, well designed, follow their branding and style, and not too juvenile so as to lose interest of the adults with money to spend.
On my end, I wanted to take the design work a step (or several steps) above previous yearbooks, giving it the attention and design detail that it deserved to stand on it's own and not feel like a cut and paste "do it yourself" yearbook template. I did a lot of design spitballing and test pages to walk the line between making it still feel like Experiences Canada, while totally overhauling it's design compared to previous years.
Compiling content - Locating, editing, organizing, and prepping content for use. Most of this time was spent downloading, cropping, and organizing student photos that were submitted throughout the year.
Concepting, researching, sketching, and planning potential designs for the yearbook. Followed by feedback and getting approval to move forward with design plans.
Building out the yearbook, setting up page templates, editing and making assets, deciding how to lay everything out. The sheer volume of photos to choose between and lay out nicely made this take a while.
Getting final feedback on designs, making small tweaks, duplicating yearbook, and creating french version. This chunk relied the most on others, as I was waiting on translations to be finished to be able to implement.
I went with a pretty major shift in feeling and style from previous yearbooks, as my goal was to give them something that really had personality and reflected more of the youth/yearbook aspect than the corporate/annual report. I put a lot of work in to make use of the brand colours, and to bring in a bright, youthful, fun feeling to the book. The doodle style assets were carried through other materials by the other design intern, creating a cohesive look through the brands new material for this year.
The opportunity to create such a big project almost entirely on my own this early on in my career is something I’m incredibly proud of. Being able to see something tangible that I created in a real and professional format has helped to give me so much more confidence in my skills and abilities as a designer, and further confidence that I made the right choice in careers.
Experiences Canada has their brand identity set up perfectly, but they are still a small crew and sometimes things slip through the cracks. I found it rather difficult to get ahold of all the specific assets I needed for the yearbook, and had to spend a great deal of my contract period finding, gathering, and organizing student submitted photos and testimonials. This did cause a fair amount of stress, as I wasn't their communications officer, I worried I was missing things and was going to end up accidentally excluding certain exchanges or kids because I couldn't locate their content.
