Bow Seat

 OVERVIEW

The 2021 Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest, Water Rising, encouraged students to reflect upon both the necessity of water and its endangered future.

Receiving a record high 6,000 entries in poetry, short fiction, film, art, interactive multimedia, dance, and music, the 2021 Contest marked an important moment in Bow Seat’s evolution as one of the leading nonprofit programs for youth advocacy in climate issues.

Every year, Bow Seat produces a yearbook containing winning entries from the Contest to sell in their online store and promote the Contest at in-person events. I was hired to redesign the layout and user experience of the Bow Seat yearbook for its 2021 publication.

PROCESS

Designing for interactivity and impact.

Although lacking in multimedia support, the physicality of the print medium forges a unique tactile connection between user and content. Leveraging this quality, I implemented two primary new design features in the 2021 yearbook redesign that not only make the book easier to navigate but also serve to greater amplify student work.

Color themes

Unique color themes derived from Bow Seat’s visual identity were formulated for each of the Contest’s categories to enable users to more easily differentiate between sections. Due to their position along the outer bleed margin, the color-coded tabs for each entry form a helpful visual index along the book’s fore-edge which indicates the location of the different age divisions and submission categories. The consistent presence of these visual indicators throughout the book help situate the reader as they tab through the pages.

QR codes

Student works in the film, music, dance, interactive multimedia, and spoken word categories are accompanied by a QR code that directs readers to any videos, gifs, or interactive demos relevant to that piece. Before, readers who wanted to more closely view works from these categories would have had to search for the piece on the Bow Seat website. The addition of QR codes creates a simple and intuitive userflow, making it infinitely easier for readers to engage with Bow Seat’s growing number of multimedia entries.

IMPACT

A flexible and reusable design system.

The Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest receives thousands of diverse entries every year, across a number of categories. One of the primary challenges I faced in designing the 2021 yearbook was how to develop a design system capable of not only accommodating but properly showcasing such a range of inputs––poems, short stories, films, music, and fine art all require different modes of presentation.

I designed a family of templates for every category to account for differences in submissions and potential edge cases, creating a sense of consistency and continuity throughout the book’s 328 pages, even across entries from categories as different as fiction and film. This design system will be used again in the production of Bow Seat’s upcoming 2022 yearbook.