2024 Year in Review
Organization: Yale School of Public Health
My Role: Graphic Designer
Tools: Adobe InDesign
Timeline: March - June 2024
Approach and Strategy
For the 2024 Year in Review, I was new to my role, and this was one of my first major projects at YSPH. The team’s goal was to expand the publication from a short, three-page research overview into a larger, 10-page PDF that provided a comprehensive overview of the entire school. As we approached independence, we wanted to highlight the exceptional work being done across YSPH. Before beginning the redesign, I conducted research to understand why the publication had been approached the way it was previously and identify opportunities for improvement.
To begin the redesign process, I conducted a competitive analysis of peer schools’ Year in Review publications. Key findings included:
Many schools were producing digital-first publications, often as full webpages rather than PDFs.
Very few schools offered digital PDFs, and when they did, the PDFs were long and comprehensive, covering the entire school.
This research helped identify opportunities for YSPH to create a concise yet visually engaging digital PDF that showcased the school’s achievements.
Although I brought these findings to leadership, the strategy had been set to create a PDF so we moved forward in that direction.
Since this was the first major design project I was working on with the team, I wanted to ensure that I set expectations and managed up appropriately. To do this, I created a whiteboard where the editorial team began to map out the content plan for each of the pages. Doing this allowed us to easily visualize the organization and distribution of the content, as well as gave us the opportunity to collaborate and provide feedback or comments to each other.
Final Product
Impact
The 2024 Year in Review was redesigned and expanded from three pages into a 10-page publication.
It was sent to approximately 9,159 email recipients and had an open rate of 42%.