From the Nominator

In the early winter of 2020, our magazine team was hard at work putting together what we thought would be a pretty strong feature well for the spring/summer issue. By mid-March, as our office transitioned to remote work and students finished their semesters in virtual classrooms, almost nothing we had planned for the magazine felt right to us anymore. We scrapped almost everything and started over from scratch.

It’s hard to process a historic event when you are in the middle of it, so instead we set out to document the experiences of alumni living through it. We wanted to put something out in the world that captured, in a printed time capsule, the human experience across a large, diverse cross-section of alumni. It felt important to include the most ordinary, real and raw moments of people’s experiences adapting to the pandemic.

At a sprawling 12 pages, our pandemic feature package, “In Medias Res,” set the tone for the rest of the magazine. We included several VIP alumni in the package, but made sure, visually, to treat them like everyone else. COVID-19 doesn’t play favorites and we didn’t want to either. We also knew that so many first-person stories back-to-back could feel repetitive, so we talked early on about varying the questions we asked and the length and tone of the answers we selected. And we worked to balance the hard stuff with lighter moments of humor, joy, and creativity.

From the Judges

We found this storytelling presentation to do an excellent job in having the design reflect the subject matter. The opening spread created disjointed movement and emotion, which was true to the topic at hand. The general feeling of the design is what established the piece. The photography represents transitional moments in time. The layout is unique in having the columns break up the story. The layout is also unusual, like the COVID experience. The small illustrations were creative, and added a nice cohesive touch to the design.