Helios
Sunny Hills High School, Fullerton, Calif.
NSPA Pacemaker Finalist
Adviser: Lindsay Safe
Editors: Sandy Yang, Amrita Mainthia, Eun-Sol Cho, Caroline Chae
Walsworth representative: Therese Lyons
With so many things demanding the attention of students at their school, the Helios staff chose to focus each spread on “What matters.” Story angles were chosen to highlight what drives students at the school to work, to succeed or to care. Clean, contemporary designs and crisply written copy underscore the reporting that went into distilling each story topic down to the most important details.
The concept behind the presentation of content books ties strongly to the theme. Stories, sidebars and photos all focus on what matters. Cutout photos, short copy blocks and compelling sidebars present the important things in Sunny Hills High School students’ lives concisely.
The opening spread lists things that both date and place the book: “Breaking 2000 on the SATs. Checking the new vibrating text message during class. Driving through the crunched streets in Amerige just to get Starbucks. Running on the treadmill for at least fifteen minutes at 24. Sure, it matters. But there’s more to it,” the opening copy begins.
The copy then introduces three students who are featured in the rest of the opening section: a senior who donated bone marrow to his sister, a junior who overcame stage fright and a sophomore who learned sign language. These three students represent the entire population of Sunny Hills High School, and the stories of what matters to these three show that the students at Sunny Hills care deeply about many different things.
The sidebar on this spread is brilliant. Quick quotes act as captions to photos that highlight the items cast members label as “must haves” for pre-show routines. This sidebar draws readers in, and it meshes with the Helios theme, too.
Sidebars like this one appear throughout the book, making it clear that the staff understood its audience. Thorough reporting is obvious in each story and sidebar. How else could the staff have written concise, compelling, interesting stories that maintain the frank, honest tone of the book?
This spread’s design is typical of the 2008 book: A clean font with interesting treatments, consistent internal margins, well-placed white space and attention to detail draw the reader around each spread of the book.
When it comes to dominance, the Helios staff is anything but shy. Each divider spread features a very large photo, complimented by a theme-related headline and a smaller photo of a student with the background removed. About half a page of copy — written in first-person from the perspective of the student featured in the cutout — introduces each section.
On this spread, the sports divider, the headline “What matters is representation” gets at the heart of the theme copy, which features the golf team’s representative at an important tournament. “When I’m out on the golf course, it’s dead silent,” the copy reads. “If only you heard the competition roaring inside my head. It’s at that moment that I push myself to aim, hit and win. Not for the title, but for the team.”
In some yearbooks, portrait pages lack the consistency of the rest of the book. This is not a problem for the Helios staff. This spread, like the other panel spreads in the book, presents a mini-profile. Here it focuses on a freshman whose passion is ballet. The cutout photos, clean fonts and lines on this spread echo the design elements throughout the book.
