Lehman Research Booklet — Editorial Layout

Lehman College is the City University of New York’s only four-year college, located in the Bronx, serving the borough and its surrounding region as an intellectual, economic, and cultural hub. The National Bureau of Economic Research and the Equality of Opportunity Project ranked it fourth-highest in mobility in the nation. Lehman is a proud catalyst for economic and social mobility for its students, almost half of whom are first-generation college students.

Recently, the college sought to highlight its achievements in research and scholarships earned during the 2023-2025 period. Even though there were some economic challenges in the previous years, this year the college wanted to showcase those achievements, as new progress was made towards certain goals.

To do this, the college tasked me with designing a booklet listing the scientists’ names, experiences, and research. This booklet would be named “Advancing Knowledge, Impacting Communities”, which debuted in Fall 2025. 
This included designing the book cover and creating the layout with the existing brand, color, and identity elements.

Initially, when designing this booklet, the measurements were set to a 5x7 mini booklet, consisting of just eight pages. However, during the booklet’s creation, I was told to change the size to 11 x 8.5, which in turn had me alter the layout and sizes significantly. Also, as the booklet was being created, more information was added, which meant changing the size, as a small book wouldn’t be able to support that
much text.

I wanted the booklet to feel warm and full of life, despite being full of information and data, so my solution was to incorporate shapes throughout the booklet. This is evident in the titles and images of the professors.

Another challenge was to provide the reader with places to pause in the booklet. As this booklet contained a lot of information, it would tire the reader out if there were no pages that gave them breathing room. My solution to that was to insert chapter breaks at certain intervals (i.e., the beginning of new sections). These chapter breaks consisted of an image that occupied a full spread, with supporting text alongside it. Other times, the image would fit on one page, since the main goal was to print the booklet, which meant the final page count had to be a multiple of 4. The final output turned out to be an 11-in by 8.5-in booklet containing 36 pages.