LEAD Essentials 2024 Cohort Yearbook

The University of Florida hosts a supplemental educational program for our donor units called LEAD Essentials, which is a 6 month long training series that employees “graduate” from.

This yearbook concept was curated, developed, and produced by myself June-September 2024, and was done using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign for the production, Canva for printing.

Revamping Old Ways

With this program having existed for quite a while, upon my addition to the team back in 2023 we were only giving the LEAD Essentials Graduates a commemorative plaque.

The issue?

For employees who’d have been with UF for a while, they tend to wrack up quite a collection of various plaques, medallions, certificates, etc, and they all collect dust!

I was tasked with creating a more engaging and entertaining solution to commemorate the cohort, and came up with a printed yearbook instead. I wanted to focus on creating something that was heavily influenced by a classic yearbook that incorporated a variety of UF elements and celebrated the cohort.

Course Overview

This section was to show a summary of each of the 6 units that everyone has to attend.

While I do like how this turned out, my original intent with this page was to have a layered, scrapbook like feel. With how harsh some of the shadows are for the unit blocks and the gaussian blur is for the arrow “stickers”, I think this could’ve been executed a bit differently.

Having a less flat background and using better masks for the unit backgrounds would’ve helped, I believe.

Your Personality is Showing

Carrying on the feel of a traditional school yearbook, I included several personality bits throughout this piece. We had sent out a survey asking a variety of preferential questions, and one of the topics was about a go-to breakfast order.

I’m not thrilled with how I set up the font hierarchy in this section, but with how limited UF’s branding is, this was one of the better combinations at the time.

I do really appreciate how I achieved that textured menu look for the background though, but could’ve used more references for what menus look like to really hone into that feel.

Wrapping Up

This project was really well received by the cohort and organization alike, but what really topped this off was that I was able to get the UFA VP to write a personal note to the cohort.

Being able to coordinate with a variety of teams and individuals allowed me to learn a lot more about this program, and supporting something like this was a really unique experience.

I learned not only about how to manage longer term projects and blending a wide spread of assets together into one piece, but also how to better improve my Adobe skills.