From the Nominator

This issue was the first of two anniversary issues celebrating the magazine’s 100th birthday. To celebrate, we dug through 100 years of past New Trail issues to unearth how alumni experience has changed—and stayed the same—and followed the themes and threads that continue to tie us together a century later. The issues collectively shared 100 things we learned while reading 100 years of New Trail.

We wanted to keep the anniversary issues lighthearted, celebratory, and engaging for our audiences. The comic-book theme helped us to do just that. Since these issues collectively share 100 of our favourite moments from a century of New Trail magazines, we invited readers to connect to the university and to their own university experiences through nostalgia and memory. The retro-style comic book cover helped readers tap into the past before they even opened the magazine. 

The cover illustration came from a 1957 story detailing the university's recent purchase of a massive analogue computer that would “be used for solving practical problems of the power industry in Alberta and to assist in the training of electrical engineers in the complexities of modern electric system designs.” The computer was 21 feet long, seven feet high and 2 1/2 feet deep, and was known as “the brain.” Not only does a massive futuristic computer board called “the brain” scream comic book cover but, strategically, it showed that the U of A has always been on the front lines of exciting research and technology.

From the Judges

Creative, unexpected, and somehow utterly perfect. The attention to detail—in typography, the masthead and superhero in the upper left, the “special issue” stamp, and more—makes this really true to its comic book inspiration, and lifts this execution so far above what it might have been. The amount of research and thought that went into the project is impressive, and the result is really fun, nostalgic,  and playful in the best way. We all not only wanted to read this issue, we want to see Part 2!