smOS - Get Connected

Process

I was the Executive Yearbook Editor for this project. I was responsible for guiding the team through the ideation, content-generation and design of the book literally from cover to cover. There were 13 other members on the team and I delegated sections to each one of them, tracking accountability for meeting deadlines and walking them through their copy and journalism. I didn't write all of the copy... just edited and verified most of it. Not a single page out of the 150 was submitted without me having seen it at least five times.

This is a walkthrough of the final product–a result of countless hours of editing and formatting in such a way to make this year's yearbook one that will be hard to put down.

Above are screenshots from our team's Google Docs during the ideation and design process. Besides outlining the entire theme, we created some basic guidelines and checklists for the staff to follow while gathering photos, information, interviews and copy.

Above are the front and back covers of the book. I'm demonstrating the gloss effect on the "app" rectangle of smOS. The rest of the book had a soft matte texture to complement the bubbly canvas inspired by the dynamic background that iOS 7 was advertised with. The cover featured elements of the lock page of an iPhone with the arrow and bar at the bottom of the screen. The backcover featured a leaf, the symbol of St. Mary's, in gloss like the Apple Logo on the back of every Macbook and iPhone.

The opening page of the book featured a brief introduction and the table of contents as sections in the "password-unlock" of a phone. Each number represented a section in the book, and each section had a four letter title that would be represented at the bottom of each page in the book. The copy was blatantly influenced by Jony Ive's sophisticated tone in introducing Apple products:

Since the turn of the century we have associated being “connected” with the internet and technology, but it is so much more than our usage of cellphones and computers. Connectivity relies on the relationships we build on a daily basis. Ultimately of course, "Getting Connected" defines our lives as members of the St. Mary’s community--as users and active contributors to the St. Mary’s Operating System, or smOS.

In 2014, the smOS experienced a reboot, a refreshing charge of enthusiasm in both spirit and interconnectivity. While the popularity of social media and "apps" escalated dramatically, the community rekindled a passion for Crusader culture and ethos. Our online social interactions were inscribed in the social media servers of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Vine, but our personal interactions were inscribed in heart and legacy of the community.

With what we’ve been able to achieve together this year, we see smOS as moving in a new direction, an initial redefining what it means to be “connected”. Plug-in, recharge, and swipe the page to both unlock the profile of the 2013-2014 school year and experience smOS for yourself.

Passbook was the first section of the book, covering all of the summer trips and off-campus trips that occurred before and during the school year. The Helvetica Neue Thin title on an extremely subtle yellow-to-orange linear gradient was one of the most blatant references to iOS7 made in the book. The colored squares add character and texture to the huge space in the page occupied by the divider, and were inspired by Window 8. A great collaboration of flat design for a stunning divider. More divider examples will appear later in this project.

Some of the layouts featured large pictures divided among multiple boxes so the grid was maintained by the photo could be presented in a large size. This worked for panoramas, landscape, and portrait photos. Each section has a main topic photo under the title in the upper corner. The photos unfortunately don't do a lot of justice for how readable the text was over the cover photos. We added a drop-shadow on the copy text to increase legibility on detailed cover photos.

One of the best parts of making this book was inserting subtle details that silently change in the background. Take for example, the battery in the upper right corner of each page. As the reader turns the pages of the book, the battery gradually fills-up, so if the reader were to quickly thumb-through the upper right-corner, they would see a little animation of the battery "charging up." Another subtle feature is the "selected" icons at the bottom of the page. Each icon would color with the base hue of the page it was on, in the appropriate section. Once again, an homage to the iOS experience.

One of the points I emphasized to journalists was to gather direct quotes from key-members of each organization to fill in these iMessage-style bubbles. Each bubble fit perfectly into the layout, and added a point of reference to the content of the page. This quote from the swim captain set the context for the photos surrounding her on the page.

For unique events, we chose a separate color-scheme than from the divider to accommodate different lighting, such as for Homecoming dance. This is one of the more unique pages too because all of the photos were filtered with the same style of filter–a pale blue with warm skin-tone accents. In an effort to create the most accurate experience of 2014, we filtered every photo with Instagram-styled filters. This did add another layer of work for the journalists, but was another outlet through which readers could recall memories of their school year. The Instagram filter is probably the most stylized indicator of the iOS7 years, so it seemed only appropriate to include it. I urged the staff to "filter-ironically."

We interviewed a handful of students from each class about their phone-usage habits and their favorite apps. It will be interesting to see which apps people are still using when they look back to this yearbook.

For this year's senior dedication section, we wanted to give each senior their own unique quarter of a page for a professional portrait, a baby picture, and a personality picture. But to make each section even more personal, we manually extracted primary and secondary colors from the photos to render gradients and assign complimentary color texts. The methodology of assigning colors was simple: A primary color was selected from the professional picture, and served as the background for the name, "most-likely", and dedication. The color of the stripe that divided the name and "most-likely" from the dedication was pulled from the baby photo on the opposite part of the module, to create a linear side-to-side viewing of content. The font color was selected from accents that would compliment the professional photo from any of the photos in the module, but most often from the main photo.

The second-to-last page of the yearbook, and the battery is filled. Another subtlety we included was in the "Time" at the top of each page. The hour digit represented the section (as defined in the table of contents on the first page) and the minute digits represented the page within each section. So 5:40 would be the 40th page of the 5th section.

The final page of the yearbook acknowledged the "Genius Bar" (reference to Apple Store employees) known as the yearbook staff. With the guidance of Lily Harrie, our advisor Mrs. Hunter, and myself, we were able to design this awesome piece of our school's history. Ironically, this was the year that St. Mary's started enforcing stricter cellphone rules, so we thought it would be funny to have individual photos of all of us playing or texting on phones while our advisor pulled her hair out.

For the endsheets of the book, we made this connected grid of names of everyone in the school. When everyone signs their yearbooks at the end of the year, they can locate their own name and sign next to it, or just sign over the wattermarked grind.

A couple of things to note about this entire project:

- Each page of each section had to be planned and executed with two timelines in mind, the chronological order of receiving content for the pages, and the printing timeline for the yearbook company. There were four deadlines for submitting the book, and once each page was submitted, there was no correcting them.

- We were using the Yearbook company's editing software to produce each page in the cloud. The alternative was to design everything in inDesign and submit pdfs, but it was hard enough to get the class through the learning-curve of the cloud editor, so we rarely produced things outside of the editor with exception to the dividers, which I manually photoshoped and pasted into their positions. All of the filtering for the photos was done through a separate website, and we had to sample colors for the senior pictures using browser color-selection modules. We were also limited to the fonts we could use, and seeing as iOS 7 made distinct use of Helvetiva Neue Thin, we had to render it separately for the cover and dividers. VAG Rounded was the closest font hosted in the cloud editor we could get for the iOS look.

What I Learned

Pace is everything with a project like this. Thankfully, the quartered deadlines set a good rate to follow and delegate within.

A yearbook is all about creating a consistent brand and rhythm across the book, so it’s essential to find the right patterns early on. It's almost 2x harder to make a new pattern. Additional patterns have to serve their function while fiting within the original patterns and scaling to new applications.

You can push the constraints of a project when you give a team a larger toolbox. Rendering filters is the perfect example of this, where we found a quick, easy-to-use online filtering application that had a really low learning-curve and allowed editors to be creative.