The Naval Postgraduate School‘s Teaching and Learning Commons (TLC) utilized my team to publish their 2021 TLC Year in Review, the organization’s annual report. The TLC was a multi-team collaboration between the Dudley Knox Library, the on-campus IT services, and the Associate Provost for Graduate Education to provide resources and tools to educators and students at NPS.

Each of the TLC Year in Review reports provided NPS’s Pentagon stakeholders with an easily digestible overview of the TLC’s accomplishments that year. Key points were program outcomes, statistics and data analytics, and featured events like webinars and workshops.

As the third issue in the series, this report expanded on the previous two to show NPS’s stakeholders how the TLC was furthering Naval education.

Printing

The TLC Year in Review is printed in-house by NPS’s own print shop on heavy glossy coated stock. The print shop provided me with color profiles as well as crop and bleed specifications to ensure I could provide them with print-ready files. Every page is printed full bleed for a professional and polished feel.

Every publication in this series is folded and stapled to bind it together, so they all have a multiple of four pages. This was a bit challenging when the initial page count was a little over nine, so I had to get a bit creative with insets and half-page features to bring it up to twelve.

QR codes

For the content design, the TLC specifically requested that I include a scannable QR code whenever a section of the publication had a relevant webpage. Thankfully, Adobe InDesign makes this very easy; I chose to keep a consistent size of 1″ wide and tall across every code (with one exception due to space constraints). I also included call-to-action text with each QR code where needed to clarify the QR code’s purpose.

Front cover

Past: A campus-favorite photo of a student on his way to class carrying far too many books

Present: Students in a modern-day seminar hall with their laptops taking notes

Future: A simulator room in use to demonstrate an undersea warfare scenario

Back cover

Past: Students in uniform walking down the breezeway next to Root Hall

Present: Students studying together at a table in one of the Outdoor Spaces

Future: A professor using an interactive simulator display during a classroom lecture

This page of the report followed mostly the same format set in the two previous issues: a sidebar featuring the portraits of the TLC leadership, and their foreword. I confirmed I had the latest official portraits of all three directors, and I also captured their signatures digitally using a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 touchscreen tablet display.

(Signatures obscured for privacy reasons.)

To emphasize NPS’s increased reach with the distance learning program as well as their international presence, I chose one of NPS’s most iconic features: a small pond with a fountain just outside the historic Herrmann Hall is surrounded by flags of the United State’s allied nations. The flags reflect the diversity of NPS’s international student body, something the school is rightly proud of.

The drop cap (the large W in the top left of the page’s content) effectively sets the tone of this report as an article-based publication. I established the visual language of the report’s typography early on, and kept it consistent throughout using global character and paragraph styles in InDesign.

Co-Director feature

One of the TLC’s co-directors provided this brief commentary on how the TLC will positively impact digital literacy at NPS.

I was provided with a graphic from an Educause publication to adapt for use in this report. I made several changes:

• Rearranged the graphic to fit vertically
• Rebuilt the graphic as vector shapes for better print quality
• Changed the color palette to NPS colors
• Edited the copy to reflect the NPS mission and values

GWC feature

GWC’s transformation during the shift to online education in 2020 and 2021 included several new digital resources. These resources range from interactive games to large-format posters and printable quick-reference cards.

Since GWC maintains these resources in Canva, I was able to export print-ready versions of them for use on this page. I added subtle drop-shadows to improve how they visually stacked and overlapped. The QR code also has a faint outline outside its white margin to improve readability.

The Data Analytics Informing Teaching and Hybrid Learning initiative, known as DAITA HL, resulted in a set of six grants. Each recipient produced a webinar for their project to present their findings to other NPS faculty.

I used the webinar recordings as sources for images to feature for each of the two primary projects. Since they both focused on very visual systems (virtual/augmented reality and a data dashboard), I easily found the perfect still frame to highlight each project.

For the other projects, I just used the portraits of each grant recipient.

The TLC website’s QR code provided much more detailed information about each recipient and their project, as well as links to each webinar recording.

This page still mostly follows the three-column grid, with some minor departures from the page template’s gutter guidelines for the sake of the page’s content.

READ Posters

Through my time on this team, I designed several READ posters for the Dudley Knox Library. These posters are framed and displayed in the library, as well as published in NPS’s online archive, called Calhoun.

I tried a few options for placement of the posters, and they looked best when aligned with each other rather than at an angle like some of the other graphics in this report. I also added a subtle outer shadow to each poster to help visually separate it from the background and other posters.

Library online/onsite shift

In this short feature about the Dudley Knox Library adapting its resources and services, I ran into a few design challenges. The text layout was awkward when aligned to the standard 3-column grid I used elsewhere in the report. I also wasn’t happy with the image in the same side-by-side layout as the other features.

I chose to make the image the full width of the feature and break the text from the page template’s grid. Additionally, I moved the QR code and its caption down a bit so there wasn’t quite so much negative space in the bottom right.

Outdoor Classrooms

NPS’s outdoor classrooms were designated spaces that could be reserved online during class sessions. During the (admittedly rare) warm sunny days in Monterey, these provided a refreshing change of scenery for students and professors.

I also created a one-sheet flyer for the Outdoor Spaces, so I re-used a picture from that. The QR code has an outer shadow behind it to help it stand out better.

Hybrid Classrooms

This feature, showcasing NPS’s hybrid classroom technology capabilities, presented some design challenges.

ITACS provided the raw data to us, and I tried several options for charting it in an intuitive, readable format. One challenge we repeatedly faced was how to positively spin the data set: focus on what we have, rather than the progress still needed. In the end, I decided on the same sort of feature grid we commonly see in software applications.

For the accent color, NPS blue was too close to black, and yellow was too hard to read, so I chose a pleasant green from the NPS color palette instead.

This article, written by the Director of the TLC, began with a quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt. I chose to make that a pull quote to really emphasize it, and added President Roosevelt’s portrait (from Wikimedia Commons) as well.

I tried a few different options for the corner radius of both President Roosevelt’s portrait and the gray box, but felt that keeping them both consistent with the rest of the publication looked the least jarring.

Since the content of this article directly references NPS Next, another initiative, I obtained that logo and added it to the aerial view of campus.

Dr. Lester also provided references for me to include at the end. I formatted them as directed by our team’s Instructional Designers and hyperlinked the URLs. In the print-only PDF, the URLs still show up in blue with underlines to visually indicate the links for accessibility.

This page, with two very text-heavy features, proved to be the most challenging layout of the report. The three-line headline for the Consortium led to some awkward placement of the body copy and logo. Eventually, we presented four different options to TLC leadership, and they selected the one they preferred.

Due to space constraints, the QR code for the Consortium feature is only 3/4″ long, but I verified scannability with several phones before committing to that layout.

In the Provost’s message, this is the one panel of the report that I’m still not fully happy with. The body copy is very dense and still more difficult to read than I’d like, but we simply ran out of time before our publication deadline to fine-tune this one any further.

Possible ideas I might try if I were to go back and redo it:

• Find a way to add more space between quotes, or some sort of divider
• Change the faculty names to yellow as a way to make them more visually distinct from the quotes
• Make the Provost’s portrait just a little bit smaller to get some vertical space back
• Play with a two-column layout to see if that’s more forgiving for the paragraph spacing