After a short introductory project in the summer of Year One, our first 'official' project of our Editorial design module was to produce a redesign of The Ephemerist, the magazine of The Ephemera Society.
If you're not a complete design nerd and are asking, 'What on Earth is ephemera?', the Society's website gives a definition:
The term ‘ephemera’ covers a wide range of documents including leaflets, handbills, tickets, trade cards, programmes and playbills, printed tins and packaging, advertising inserts, posters, newspapers and much more. In the words of the society’s founder, Maurice Rickards, “the minor transient documents of everyday life”.
Our task was to redesign both the annual's exterior and interior spreads; in the process handling large quantities of text and images, in addition to captions, footnotes, and other fiddly things that tend to leave you wanting to hit your head against the keyboard.
But of course even I have to admit that it was incredibly good experience as a project.
The version here is the one that I've reworked based on feedback from the original project. Being completely honest, that was the lowest grade I've received on a piece of design work since being at uni. The actual making of the book itself was probably the most stressful part of the entire process (though trying to fit those captions in was a close second). But with plenty of cursing and pleading with the printers (the Xerox variety, not the people sort) to be kind, the think came together fairly well, even if it was an exercise in how far improvisation can get you in craft. With all of the book presses occupied, I found that turning a table over and using its weight to help the glue bind worked surprisingly well. The result was a far more sturdy result than the previous one. 
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