From Monday, Oct. 17, until Wednesday, Oct. 26, the 2021-2022 L’Acadien Yearbook will be distributed to students at no charge in a variety of places throughout campus.
On Monday, Oct. 17, the yearbook will be distributed on the Union Porch. Tuesday, Oct. 18, it will be at a table in front of The Brew in the student union. Wednesday, Oct. 19, in Edith Dupre Library. Thursday, Oct. 20, in the Quad. Then on Monday, Oct. 24, in Moody Hall. Tuesday, Oct. 25, and Wednesday, Oct. 26, on Boucher St. Yearbooks will not be distributed on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
According to the Editor-in-Chief of the yearbook Andre Broussard, the staff met more in person to work on this book. Due to COVID-19, the last two yearbooks, 2019-2020 Focus, and 2020-2021 Viral had to be done virtually through emails and sending documents via Google Drive.
“Compared to the previous two books, yes, the staff was able to meet more in person. We did have a few setbacks because COVID came back every now and then,” said Broussard. “Whether it be school rules, but we made do, we pushed through it, and we were able to meet in the office a lot more than the previous “Focus” book and “Viral” book. There was a lot more in-person hands-on work.”
An e-edition of the yearbook will be available on the L’Acadien website after the release of the physical edition. Previous editions, such as 2019-2020 “Focus” and 2020-2021 “Viral,” are also available online. Older editions from 1912 to 2016 can be viewed online through the Edith Garland Dupre Library digitized collection.
The theme for the book is “Hope,” and what inspired the theme is the hope that we will come out of this pandemic.
“The overall concept of hope came from hoping to come out of COVID and that era, and that took on a big part of how that came to be,” said Broussard. “I know the previous two books both were done in COVID. And doing this one, looking like we were going to come out of it, for the most part, I mean, not completely. That’s what inspired that concept.”
Julia McDow is the Design Manager and delved into the yearbook’s design process. She brought up how one of the main designs in the yearbook is a dragonfly. The dragonfly, according to McDow, symbolizes hope. This yearbook also incorporated dragonfly graphics throughout due to having illustrators on the staff. Everything in the design was thought of carefully, even down to the colors and fonts students will see throughout the book.
“So from the beginning, it was just throwing things in the air, seeing what was sticking. And after a while, I thought of fireflies and how they like light in the dark, and it was during COVID,” McDow said. “So, we try to have a theme, connect to what we think the year is going to turn out to be, which is hard because it’s in the first few months, and we don’t know what’s gonna happen. We just got to just dawn our little soothsayer hats, and I thought of fireflies and how they kind of light up, and then I thought, oh, different bugs kind of symbolize different things. And then I looked it up, and a dragonfly symbolizes hope, and then a hope for change. And that’s what we were all hoping for, in the beginning of the semester, for the year. So, luckily everyone liked it enough, and we decided to incorporate dragonfly graphic throughout the book.”
Both Broussard and McDow’s favorite part about working on the book was working in a team and seeing how creative everyone is.
“Because without most of these people, the book wouldn’t be anything. It wouldn’t be anything special,” Broussard said. “But when you take all of these creative ideas and creative people and mash them all together into one book, it makes some really great things come out of it.”