1 an editorial rebrand of the alumni mag as well as multiple college mags to align them all together and with the new campus brand 2 two of my favourite inside front covers and 3 a collection of cover art and some of my favourite spreads from various issues of the alumni mag
creative/art direction for journalism and storytelling, editorial design and layout
with a wider campus brand redesign, my team thought it was time for a rebrand of the alumni mag [green & white]——and i wanted to push it a step further to get the college ‘zines onboard, too.
the goal was to make all of these publications look like they came from the same place; having a consistent visual brand across all publications no matter the college or subject would help better tell the greater usask story.
one of the main graphic elements in the campus rebrand was the icon shown above, which was also used as the [new] tagline, “be what the world needs” on various marketing collateral. in other words, this icon was about to be extremely recognizable.
when i started to think about a cover redesign for the green & white i intuitively had a vision to use this icon as the masthead in a very simple way. i’ve always been a fan of ‘zine covers that are minimal [ie: the NYT magazine] and less of a fan of covers where the masthead takes up the entire upper top [ie: standard magazines designed specifically for magazine racks].
i’d rather have more page for cover art/photography—and since these magazines don’t typically sit on magazine racks, it was an easy decision. the overall feel of the campus rebrand was bringing it back to more of a classic university style [simple], too, so i felt the icon being smaller and nicely centred at the top with plenty of breathing room on either side was aligned with that.
when the final design was legible in both colour instances to accommodate a variety of cover artwork, it was done.
I [very briefly] played with the idea of putting it on the top left but with a symmetrical icon, it looked oddly placed on the left. The detail of keeping the original style of the green & white masthead where the ‘&’ joins the two words together was a little detail I kept for tradition sake.
——
see below for three of the first with the new cover: green & white, agknowledge [college of agriculture], and connective issue [college of medicine].
the story of the inside front cover
fall 2019: courageous curiosity
My main focus was to work with the stories to make the theme come alive through pull quotes and text; for this particular issue, budget was a bit lower for photography so I leaned into the words. I found specific quotes within the stories that I knew would emphasize the theme.
A cover story had not been decided and when I merely read the quote by Ruth Aschim [inside front cover] I knew it was the one.
The words felt so fearless, adventurous, and of course, curious so I couldn’t ignore it. The editor agreed and so a story about wild pigs became the cover story and those words became the path to guide the photographs [taken by David Stobbe].
the story of the inside front cover
spring 2018: community builders
We knew the cover story was the one about a handful of local alumni turned entrepreneurs and we wanted to create a cover dynamic that would show everyone as if they were not just interacting as a group of alumni but more like old friends catching up. Saskatoon is a pretty small community and the alumni community in Saskatoon even smaller, so chances are they either were friends, or they had friends of friends.
We [the editor and I] worked with Studio D to bring this vision to life; the dirty frame shot on the inside front cover gave a very organic feel of alumni interacting in real-time to complement the story and cover photo.
a collection of some of the covers of the alumni mag [before the rebrand]:
covers were a good mix of illustrative, photography, or photos we had in the archives for both budgetary reasons as well as creative/variety.
a small collection of a few of my other favourite spreads from various issues of the alumni mag:
and, yes, my favourite part of any issue was deciding what to do with the inside front cover. I am a big fan of using that space to really draw the reader in.
