Archiving as Ritual: Crafting Your Soft Yearbook is both a creative exploration and a gentle ritual for processing and reflecting on the past year. In this course, you’ll have dedicated time to transform fragments of memory, joy, grief, and gratitude into an experimental personal yearbook prototype. You’ll browse through your digital albums, journal entries, and other documentations. No design experience is required—just a willingness to notice, reflect, and shape moments from your past into something soft, thoughtful, and whole. Materials not included.

• Develop awareness of how memory work can serve as a gentle practice for processing grief, cultivating gratitude, recognizing delightful moments, and remembering wholeness.
• ​Reflect on the balance of remembrance and release as you craft your yearbook prototype, exploring chronology alongside more personal ways of arranging meaning.
• Practice layering, sequencing, cropping, and arranging images while experimenting with different papers and backgrounds.

​Week 1 – Opening the Archives

We’ll begin by exploring the many forms personal archives can take—yearbooks, playlists, diaries, scrapbooks, and digital traces. Together, we’ll reflect on the rituals of memory-keeping and what it means to create a “soft yearbook.” You’ll begin gathering fragments that feel meaningful to you.

​Week 2 – Tracing & Mapping

This week is about seeing what you’ve collected so far and noticing the threads that run through it. You can sketch, write, or lay things out in a way that feels right. The focus is less on design and more on paying attention to the emotional rhythm of memory.

​(SKIP THANKSGIVING WEEK)

​Week 3 – Paper Play & Assembly (Studio Time)

We’ll spend this session in studio mode, trying out different ways of working with physical or digital layout. Use this time to keep shaping what you’ve started. The invitation is to play and see what emerges rather than aiming for a finished piece.

​Week 4 – Soft Shares & Closure

In our last week, we’ll come together to share some of what we’ve been working on, reflect on our processes, and offer each other gentle feedback.

Artist’s Books Unshelved on Youtube

Handmade Books at Home by Chanel Ly

Structure of the Visual Book by Keith A. Smith

Stepfanie Aguilar is a creative practitioner working with memory weaving and exploratory personal archiving through Shapeless Clouds. From time to time she hosts Memoriver Radio, a pop-up sonic capsule that drifts from place to place across Los Angeles.

Index scholarships are designed to benefit members of our community who do not have expendable cash to pay for the course, and those for whom the class price is not accessible. These need-based scholarships will go to the candidates who best demonstrate why they should be chosen for the free spot to our class based on the following criteria:

• Belong to groups that are traditionally underrepresented in the graphic design and creative industries
• Do not have jobs that would pay for these courses as professional development
• Cannot independently afford the class at list price
• Share our value of intentional community

The number of selected applicants chosen is subject to the discretion of Index and the instructor, but every course will select at least one. Apply for a scholarship here. Applications close November 10th.

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