Creating the CUSD Spring’ 17 Digest
A Process Much like that of Writing a Story
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CUSD’s vision
has always been change driven and results oriented. The qualitative aspect of our work. however, is just as important to us. The process and the purpose. How ideas are sparked. How a project becomes realized.
There are stories held by our members, teams, and CUSD as a whole.
This past spring,
CUSD finished off another strong semester with lots of promise going forward. To celebrate all the passion, hard work, and support invested by students, stakeholders, and alums, we decided to put together a digest named “STORY.”
STORY takes an inside look into the experiences of members, teams, and CUSD as a whole. Our achievements, challenges, and most important of all, our journeys, individually and collectively.
Process
The first step to writing a story, especially one that as big as CUSD and needs input from so many members & teams, is to always gather those sources. Only after that, are we able to know what we can work with.
Because this was when our New Media Plan did not exist, I needed to reach out to other CUSD team leads with the following structure for them to fill out:
Theme:
Telling CUSD’s Story
Why:
CUSD’s vision has always been change driven and results oriented. However, a simultaneous way of looking at our work that has remained consistent is “the story.” The quantitative aspect. The process. The purpose. Why we do what we do. Why doing what we do matters to us. There are stories. Individually and all together.
Structure of Digest: 3 sections of recapping:
- Teams
- Members
- CUSD
Story of teams (horizontal & vertical)
- How an idea began, inspired, and sparked
- Goals each team set out for themselves
- Plans for how to achieve
- Actions taken
- Challenges faced and overcome along the way
- Results and looking forward
Story of members
A member from each team is asked to highlight & sum up their individual experience for the semester
CUSD’s Story
Summary of the semester from CUSD’s perspective
After gathering the required content,
the next step came layouts. Because this was my first time creating a digest using Indesign, I had to look through a couple of templates for ideas, inspiration, and general advice for how other designers handled their approach.
While creating, I also received feedback from eboard members that our previous digests weren’t that exciting. After doing some more research & comparisons, I realized that the biggest make or break factor was the length of texts.
We had insightful and engaging content. It was a matter of curration.
Critique of Previous Digest
Looking at our old design, I realized a continuous pattern of chunks of large paragraphs. This was not only an added barrier that might turn away potential readers, but it was also simply too hard to read because of scale. In addtion, a common feedback was thinking of other ways to make the digest more interesting, visually, without steering too far away from CUSD’s brand.
From Research,
I drew inspiration from layouts that tried both conventional & unconventional methods in breaking up texts and distributing them across one or multiple pages to make for an easier read.
As for visual appeal, I stuck to CUSD’s and its projects’ main colours while also incorporating my own ideas about the “STORY” element.
Here is the result
Large Mocks
Tony is currently a rising Junior majoring in Fine Arts and minoring in Business at Cornell University, Ithaca NY. He recently interned in Washington D.C. over the summer as a Product Design and Marketing Intern for Agnes.io
He can be reached at:
www.therealit.com
dl548@cornell.edu
607–379–7759
