This project was, quite frankly, a nightmare. I was tasked with updating the Herff Jones catalog for scholastic medals and awards, but the previous iteration was created by non-designers at our jewelry plant. While the text was editable, the images on each page were a flattened Photoshop document, no layers. Worse, all the medals were photographed on a marble countertop. This necessitated days of tedious work to cut out the background from every page, split each medal out into its own image, and place them all again in the InDesign document.
This overhaul was prompted by a brand refresh that HJ underwent in 2018, and so much of the actual layout work was converting old formats to match new branding, typefaces, and formatting. This aspect of it was much more pleasant to work on, and the final product definitely turned out well.
This catalog was updated in 2020 and 2021 with minor price changes or product tweaks, but no significant design changes were implemented. In 2022, our dominant brand look had started to shift; we were utilizing Benton Sans as our primary typeface instead of Tungsten, and the striped graphic elements were retired as well. A look at the new design done in more recent years can be found here.
