The above consists of a selection of pages I designed for the Canadian International School of Hong Kong yearbook as the senior editor. As the role of senior editor, I worked alongside our supervisor, junior editors and members to create the annual yearbook distributed during the last day of school.
My role consisted of designing more challenging pages requiring more substantial knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite (compared to pages of the students' individual photos), choosing the designs of the yearbook, mentoring our junior editors and editors-in-training, leading tutorial workshops for our new members, organizing the pages to ensure all of them are complete, and checking the work of members to ensure all formats are correct.
From starting as a member to advancing to senior editor in my last two years had allowed me to develop numerous skills that have been continuously helpful outside of the role:
• Leadership: as the senior editor, it taught me how to be a leader through the mentorship of our younger editors, teaching them about our role, the methods in which we can check for errors and fix them and how to teach our general members. I've also learnt leadership through personally working with our members, teaching tutorial sessions, encouraging them to ask for help if needed, yet also being firm when approaching deadlines, sometimes chasing down late submissions.
• Teamwork & Collaboration: being on the Yearbook team has grown my ability to collaborate with others, not only knowing when to take charge, but also knowing when to rely on the other editors, how to discuss our ideas and opinions, and building trust in the team, working with each other to create an end product each year.
• Communication: not only does being the editor help in my visual communication of events and memories, but also aided in my communication skills when talking to members and the teaching staff and how to talk/email them in the write tone that would encourage them to help or ensure that they complete their work.
• Creativity, Graphic Design & Visual Editing: as for the actual design aspect of my role, designing these pages have improved my ability to creatively use Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator to present photographs and events in aesthetically pleasing ways.
• Detail Orientation: because each of the photographs have to be in a specific format, and as the role of editor, I have the responsibility of ensuring all the photographs used are correctly converted, I has developed my sense of detail and being able to pick out small mistakes that would have delayed printing.
Being on the Yearbook Team has helped me evolve to become a leader and become more confident in my abilities. Not only developing my graphic design skills but also my communication skills that help me tremendously in other endeavours. It showed me a potential career path that I would like to explore and was the main reason that I chose to apply for the Bachelor of Media Studies program.