Now that our Darlington Community has seen our first one-school yearbook, I thought I would share what went into making Volume 90 of the Jabberwokk.
We consider yearbook a varsity sport and strive to exceed national standards in our creation of it. My role was that of coach — our captain, Ethan Pender ('16), led his team of players in the creation of every page of this book. Selena Chen ('16), managing editor of design, led the visual voice of the publication and became an InDesign master faster than any student I’ve ever taught. National standards dictate that students make all content decisions and that's what this team did — they combined their talents and worked tirelessly to create the best book possible.
Yearbook students have the luxury of having their homework published for not only their peers to see, but their parents, teachers, administrators and community members. No pressure, right? In the pursuit of making each spread as historically accurate as possible, many revisions take place. Receiving constant feedback on your work isn't for the faint of heart — we tell staff members during our first weeks together that learning to take criticism and grow from it is hard. Some thrive from input, some shut down. Our editor-in-chief has to balance leading a cohesive team while refusing to accept mediocrity. We traveled to two national conferences where our editors presented their spread drafts to national consultants who gave even further feedback.
You've probably heard the term design thinking a lot these past few months as we look to our new schedule. By definition, it's a creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result.
The yearbook production process is an act of design thinking.
Take the Homecoming "Crowned on the Court" spread as an example. Selena's solution to the problem of how do we cover every nominated couple is a visually brilliant one that took days to figure out and complete. At one point, she asked in frustration, "Can't we just leave out the freshmen?" because she couldn't physically fit them on the page. When we told her no, she had to find a way, and she did.
We also knew for many of our younger students the book was going to be just too heavy to physically carry around to get signed. Our solution was to provide a supplement magazine with signature sheets and candids for each group within the ELA-8 division. Selena and the rest of the staff had to accept a growth mindset as we worked to find solutions to the creative problems before us.
We have the goal of creating a visually appealing historically accurate representation of life for Darlington students PK-12. We set coverage goals, always mindful to capture the lives of as many students as possible. Our incoming coverage editor, Farrin Mumpower ('17), made a spreadsheet of every student in the book and tracked how many times they were in the book compared to last year so we could do a statistical coverage analysis by grade level. This analysis will be the starting point of building Volume 91, which has already begun.
There will never be a perfect yearbook. Just as humans are flawed, the book will always have them as well. We acknowledge the errors and learn from each one of them. We strive to be better and will be conducting focus groups of students from all levels in the next week to hear what they loved and what they would change to make the book even better.
As much as yearbook is a sport in which we hope to be a national contender, yearbook is also a business that aims to meet the needs of its clients as best as possible. Our hope is that this first one-school book has done both, and will be something our Darlington Community treasures for years to come.
