From the Nominator

The Oregon Stater’s Fall 2025 cover story, “Super Fans!,” profiled alumni whose devotion to Beaver sports shows up in extraordinary ways. Because the magazine’s audience is primarily Oregon State University alumni, the cover was designed to spark recognition and nostalgia by highlighting artifacts many readers may remember from games and campus events. One featured alumna, Susan Mayer Schmidt, has filled her family room with Oregon State memorabilia, including a quilt covered with hundreds of vintage OSU pins and buttons collected over decades. The cover draws directly from that collection. More than 90 buttons from Schmidt’s quilt appear scattered across a wraparound design, creating a dense field of Beaver history and humor. Paired with oversized condensed type reading “Super/Fans,” the cover becomes an interactive “I Spy” experience. Readers are invited to scan the cover for old logos, jokes about rivals, and artifacts from their own era of Oregon State fandom. To create the composition, each button was photographed individually at high resolution. Because the quilt was too delicate to remove from the collector’s wall, the editor and freelance photographer returned for a second shoot and arranged lighting and white paper backgrounds around sections of the quilt so the buttons could be photographed in place. The designer then isolated each button and arranged them digitally into the wraparound composition, creating a playful, detail-rich cover that encourages readers to appreciate how fandom connects alumni across the years.

From the Judges

This is a cool, engaging, and creative cover that celebrates Beaver pride. Judges noted the time and care it took to isolate each image of buttons and other memorabilia. Great use of internal resources. The flow from the front to back cover is thoughtful. The sense of nostalgia made the non-Beavers on the panel believers! Overall, the concepting and execution are strong. Congratulations to the in-house team on executing a complicated concept!