The School of Visual Arts is a variety show—think of any artistic person and they are there. With students self-submitting pictures for the yearbook, it played right into the variety aesthetic. So variety and showing off variety was a major theme, to show representation of all majors and the entire school. The pandemic has been a strain on everyone. This graduating class had to do two years of school online, so keeping it uplifting and fun—through color, movement, and marks—was also fundamental to the design. Making your mark is the secondary theme because everyone at SVA is a maker and a doer. Everyone is trying to make their mark within their field, and they have to actually physically make marks first to do so. So for the cover I created letters out of the three stages of every form of art—ideas and marks on paper, cleaning them up in 2D forms, and finally to 3D forms—showing off variety and marks at the same time, representing the entire school.
I created the "variable grid system."
The challenge of the grid of the yearbook is you want it to be cohesive throughout the entire book but not get boring as you flip through a picture book, so creating a variable grid was my solution. I created four sets of blocks in set ratios that I could use within the rules I set up. Quadrant 1 and 2 are the left page and quadrant 3 and 4 are the right page. You start in quadrant 1 and then go to 2, then 3, then 4 (if your block starts in 1 and reaches into quadrant 2, then you go right to quadrant 3 since quadrant 2 is now already used).
