The AEGEE-Leiden almanac

It is a common tradition for student associations to create an almanac, either yearly or every few years. These books typically contain information about the association and its members, reflection on activities that took place, as well as pages written by groups of members or even other associations. Within AEGEE-Leiden, though, there had never been an almanac. Not for wont of trying, as some attempts had failed due to lack of time or (financial) resources. During my board year at AEGEE, we decided to give it another go as part of our seventh lustrum celebrations, and I was made the board responsible within the almanac committee.

About the committee

The almanac committee consisted of four members, including myself. Without any in-house experience with creating such a book, we did quite some research by way of other association’s creations. The process of drafting a general structure and determining what content to include was quite straightforward. Most of the content was not written by ourselves, but by members of AEGEE-Leiden or boards of other associations. However, topics that required a bit more research, as well as sections containing photos of past events, were covered by us. I remember doing some investigating for a couple of pages on the history of AEGEE-Leiden, as well as documenting the origins of our association’s characteristic green colour.

Designing the almanac

Neverthelss, my primary responsibility was the design of the almanac. We stuck to Adobe InDesign for this, as it is the industry standard for creating print media. I had never worked with InDesign before, but I’m always up for a challenge, and I had had some experience with other Adobe software such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.

Because the final product would consist of 232 pages (excluding endpages and the cover), and since there was some time pressure, I had to create a design that would be very versatile and reusable. Luckily, InDesign allows for the creation of master pages and paragraph styles, which made the process of creating pages using the content we had received and written relatively easy.

While the final design is not as eye-catching as some — I was not at all aware of the intricacies of typography and layout design at the time — I still consider the fact that we managed to create such an almanac a great achievement, especially considering our lack of experience and the time constraints. I still look into my copy from time to time, and hope that other members of AEGEE-Leiden do the same.

About the image:
The theme of the almanac was ‘Up and About’. It was partially a reference to the movie ‘Up’, as its plot of adventure and exploration was a good fit for both AEGEE as a whole as well as the theme of the seventh lustrum, ‘Adventure Is Out There’. Hence, a balloon is featured in the logo.