This is a brief overview portraying strategic creative direction for two of my best (in my opinion) issues for the USask alumni magazine, Green & White, that I worked on during my years there.
skills highlighted:
visual content organization/planning, creative/art direction, editorial design, visual storytelling
The theme for the fall 2019 issue (selected by the editor, John Grainger) was ‘courageous curiosity’. My focus for this was to work with the images (a mix of professional photoshoots, supplied photos, or stock photos) as well as finding the little nuggets (as I like to call them) for pull quotes in the stories that generally encompassed that theme.
John wasn’t set on any particular feature article being a cover story and gave me a lot of creative freedom, so when I saw the quote by Ruth Aschim (inside front cover) that felt entirely fearless and adventurous, I knew that was the one. We (John, Ruth, David Stobbe [photographer], and I) then worked together to capture a few feature photos to work with that quote.
The walk directly toward the camera looking focused was an immediate yes for the cover shot as soon as I saw it on the camera screen.
The theme for the spring 2018 issue (selected by the editor, Leslie-Ann Schlosser) was ‘community.’ We knew the cover story was to be about a handful of local alum entrepreneurs and we wanted to create a cover shoot that would show the character of all the people mentioned in the one story but interacting as a group of alumni rather than individually in their own element.
We worked with Studio D to bring this vision to life and the cover shot and inside front cover (a dirty frame of the cover) turned out to have a very welcoming, community feel and my only regret was not being able to add more photos from the shoot into the magazine.
View more of the photos here.