Month: January 2018

Purim Costumes

January 9, 2018 /

Every other year or so, my wife and I make Purim costumes for our children. My wife machine sews much better than I do, but I’m the intrepid (foolhardy?) hacker who isn’t afraid to cobble something together without a pattern. Here are some of my designs, modeled by my children. I’ve masked out their faces, to protect the innocent. You can click on any image to enlarge it.

Lip Gloss Lipstick

One of my daughters once asked me to dress her up as lip gloss. Clueless guy that I was, I figured that was another name for lipstick. (She meant the stuff that’s long and thin, like a pencil.) I don’t know if it’s apparent from the photo, but the black “tube” has little shiny dots all over it, and the fabric I used for the tip of the “lipstick” has silver “gemstones” all over it.

Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments

That same year (was it something in the water?), my son decided to dress up as Mount Sinai. That was a much simpler costume to design, and the furry “grass” fabric proved to be a great investment – you’ll see more of it a few costumes down.

Bag of Groceries, front and back

The next year, our oldest daughter wanted to be a bag of groceries. Time to buy batting! One or another of our kids wore this costume at least three different years.

Two Fish and a Fisherman

A few years later, my wife picked up a two-piece vinyl rain outfit at the thrift shop. The younger children were all doing their own things, but the two of the older kids decided to join me as a fisherman and his catch. If the fish on the pole look familiar, it’s because I featured them on an earlier post. Helpful hint: Use a low-temp glue gun for styrofoam eyes, not high-temp.

[4/7 of] A Set of Pencils

One year, the kids decided that everyone should dress up as pencils. That meant seven matching costumes, in seven sizes! I used three different t-shirt patterns (adult, child, and toddler) as my starting points. There’s batting inside the ferrules, which helps the costumes hold their tubular shapes. The bottom of each costume is split in back, so that the wearer can comfortably walk and sit down. My wife ended up doing most of the actual sewing for the caps – she could finish them more nicely, and I didn’t have time.

Two Monsters and Rainbow Dash, front and back

Horned Monster, with real bird skull necklace

Another year, the kids wanted new costumes, but I knew I wouldn’t have time for anything intricate. I told them I’d make each of them a long, sleeveless hoodie (a closed-up tube, essentially) out of whatever fabric they wanted, and that we’d work together to customize and accessorize. (Recognize the green fabric?) Almost all of the kids ended up as monsters, with different tails, horns, ears, wings, and glue-gunned appliqués. One decided to dress up as Rainbow Dash.

 

CHDS Report Cards

January 8, 2018 /

CHDS Report Cards, circa 2012 (click to view a PDF of all four)

Once upon a time, our children’s day school had volunteer curriculum committees, comprised of teachers and parents. In 2011 or 2012, I was invited to join the General Studies Committee. Among other things, I was tasked with overhauling the school’s report card forms for grades 1-8, both General (secular) and Judaic.

My wife and I had long agonized over the school’s report cards – click on the thumbnails to see them for yourself – especially those for the “Upper Level” Grades. Our biggest gripe was that there was never enough room for teachers’ comments, and once the children were in grades with multiple, specialist teachers, there was barely enough comment room for even the first quarter.

The Committee also found other weaknesses in the forms. Among them:

  • The layouts of the different forms, including the locations of the grading scales, were inconsistent.
  • There was inadequate reporting of attendance. We knew that some of our children routinely “avoided” individual subjects, but there was no standardized way to report this on the form; even the teachers themselves were potentially in the dark!
  • Some subjects and subcategories within subjects weren’t listed on the current forms, and other subjects that were on the forms needed to be removed.
  • The names and descriptions of Judaic subjects weren’t always intelligible to the uninitiated, so some parents had trouble making sense of them.

As it turned out, the school was about to implement a change from quarters to trimesters, so we had the perfect excuse to overhaul the report cards. The new forms would:

  • Be formatted as consistently as possible, through all eight grades and across all subjects, with easily recognizable labels for grade levels, classes, and subjects.
  • Provide space for each teacher, including specialists, to put down grades, attendance information, comments, and signatures, for all classes, for each subject and sub-subject, in each trimester. Ideally, all of each trimester’s information would be grouped together.
  • Provide additional space, in which each teacher could report on student behavior. This would be formatted to be consistent with SCORE, a school-wide program that had been implemented the year before. It would also include a check-box with which a teacher could request a meeting with parents.

The iconography was relatively easy. I created large icons, with which to identify a given report card as covering general or Judaic subjects. These were simple, square, black-and-white shapes, which would reproduce nicely on a photocopier.

I also came up with a system for identifying which grade (first through eighth) and which class (boys, girls, or coed) a given report card covered. (Judaic Studies classes at that time were coed for the primary grades, and gender-separated for the older grades; General Studies classes were coed through eighth grade. Later, as the school grew, all grades and classes were separated by gender.)

The icons panel

All of these icons were arranged in the upper right-hand corner of the form.

I also incorporated the school’s branding – logo and logotype – in the design.

The behavioral report took up a lot of space, so it was moved to its own page, the back of the printed report card. Once it had been laid out, it was easy to deploy throughout the school – the checklist was the same for all eight grades, so all I had to do was provide more or fewer columns for each class’ respective number of teachers.

But as I worked on the layout, I struggled with one challenge in particular: Traditional report cards are actually simple tables. They allow you to see an entire year’s grades for a given subject side-by-side, which makes it easy to track progress from term to term. Also, they often stack all of a given term’s grades in a column, which makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of a student’s overall performance in a given term. How could I make ample room for comments and other information without interfering with that kind of basic functionality?

A study in compromise – click to enlarge

In the end, the design reflected compromises between our project’s goals and the need to hold on to the simple functionality of a table, and I had to tailor those compromises to suit the teaching structures of different grades. Take the report card pictured here, for example. Five subjects are taught by one homeroom teacher, who gets one set of attendance and comment fields for each term – and those fields are positioned to the right of the grading areas for the homeroom subjects. Four other subjects are taught by specialist teachers; there’s room for attendance and comments next to each term’s grades. In theory, I could have presented the homeroom subjects’ grades in a traditional, easy-to-follow grid; in fact, doing so would probably have taken up less space. However, I decided it would simplify the form overall if the grades and terms were arranged vertically – consistant with the arrangement of the specialists’ grades.

We rolled out the new report cards in the fall of 2012. Here they are, in four PDF’s.

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This seemed like something other schools could adopt, and I eventually posted my work on Torah Umesorah‘s teacher resource web site. I know of at least one school which has expressed an interest in modifying these report cards for their own use.

 

The Mikveh Calendar

January 3, 2018 /

You can license a customized version of this calendar for your local mikveh! To learn more, please contact me at the e-mail address from the back cover of the calendar. You can also find contact info on my resume.

(Click on any image to view a PDF of that year’s calendar.)

The inspiration: a mikveh calendar from Chicago

In 2002, the women at what was then the Beth Tvillah Mikveh Society approached me about making them a personal calendar, with daily sunrise and sunset times and general information about the laws of family purity. They suggested modeling it on a calendar put out by a similar organization in Chicago.

This was a fun challenge to take on. The calendar would have to include both Jewish and secular dates, while presenting the notion that the two don’t completely overlap – Jewish calendar dates begin and end at sundown, not midnight. We also decided to add holiday information and sunrise times (which were not in Chicago’s calendar), while preserving “white” space, in which users could add notes.

The new Mikveh Calendar (5763)

My solution was to print the calendar on larger stock – half of a legal (8.5 x 14 inches) sheet, instead of Chicago’s letterhalf; the finished calendar would be seven inches wide, instead of 5.5. Chaiah Schwab provided the cover art. I made the vertical margins between days narrower than the horizontal margins between weeks; I felt this better conveyed the left-to-right flow of time, from day to day, within each week. A list of sunrise and sunset times was placed to the right of each week, in the space provided by the larger paper. I wrote a short, illustrated guide to using the calendar, and I lightly edited the rest of the text, which the ladies had provided.

5765 calendar, with chart

The women liked the calendar a lot, but some of them wanted more space for notes. I ended up replacing the last page of successive calendars with a simple chart, like one Rabbi Chaim Papelow (of Yeshivat Mikdash Melech, in Brooklyn) had once told me to make. Removing one month wasn’t as problematic as it would sound – each calendar included the first two or three months of the following year. I also experimented a bit with the page breaks in the instructional section.

The revamped 5766 calendar

In 2005, after migrating from PageMaker (the page-layout software I’d been using) on a PC to InDesign on a Mac, I completely revamped the layout, giving it an airier, friendlier, retro-modern look. At the same time, the calendar now packed much more information, something users had asked for. Sunset and sunrise times were moved into each day’s space, where they would be easier to find. The numbers for each date were arranged to reflect the order in which they began, from left to right – the Hebrew, Jewish numbers were placed in the “night time” half of each date, and the English, secular numbers were placed to the right. Religious holiday info was enhanced and expanded, and secular calendar events were added. The space where the time charts had once been was moved to the left-hand margin and laid out for organized note-taking. I redesigned the cover, using a photograph of the vintage Formica in my mother’s bathroom. The rounded rectangle shape became a visual motif that carried throughout the entire calendar. (It’s supposed to look like a vintage TV screen – and the top and bottom are not symmetrical!)

5770 – a two-year calendar

Four years later, change was afoot. A new mikveh was under construction, in a safer, more central location. The Mikveh Society itself was undergoing some organizational shifts. I redesigned the calendar’s cover to reflect those changes. The last page of the calendar was requisitioned for information about both the mivkeh and the organization. The chart was moved to the spread just before the first calendar page. At the request of some of the women, I added a panel just beneath the chart, in which I explained the Hebrew representation of Jewish dates. The calendar also moved to a two-year (27 month) format. Although each copy would cost more to print, the expense over a two-year period would be less. Also, I would only have to update the calendar every other year.

The 5776-5777 calendar

By the next time I updated the calendar, the new location had opened, and Beth Tvillah Mikveh Society had become the Cincinnati Community Mikveh. I replaced the branding on the outside of the calendar, and I added more specific location info to the back-page information section, including separate QR codes for directions to the men’s and women’s parking and entrances.

 

Annual Reports for the Kollel

January 1, 2018 /

Over the course of nineteen years, I produced eleven annual reports for the Cincinnati Community Kollel – annual in the sense that each covered a year’s activities. Over time, they evolved and grew, reflecting different periods in the Kollel’s development. I’ll include all of the reports here, for the amusement of any Kollel alumni and friends who happen to find this page.

The first three reports were very similar, and relatively simple. They were produced in-house (printed and saddle-stitched), on letter-sized paper. Although some of the photos in the PDF’s are in color, these reports were actually printed in black and white. The Kollel made a point of including financial information, provided by a volunteer bookkeeper. (Donors immediately appreciated the organization’s transparency, even if they didn’t know how to interpret financial statements, and they still do.) For these first three reports I didn’t bother prettying the financials up; I just scanned them and pasted the images into the reports. We also included a comprehensive list of everyone who had ever made a contribution; the Kollel made a point of recognizing even relatively small donations, in contrast with the norm among big-city and East Coast organizations – an attitude of which I’m still proud.

Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.

After a year’s hiatus, we did two more reports. I refreshed the visuals, and typeset the financials to match the reports’ look and feel. There were also produced in-house.

Click on an image to view that annual report as a PDF.

In 2007, the Kollel expanded into a second building and opened up a satellite location in the northern exurbs. We didn’t put out an annual report until the following spring, but when we did it reflected that expansion, moving from letter-sized (11″) paper to legal (14″). The layout was completely revamped, there were more photos (including some taken by me). We printed the cover, the centerfold, and the financials in color – on the Kollel’s first color laser printer. The following year’s report was done the same way, with the addition of a simulated group photo, featuring then-current staff and local alumni and their families.

This is how the cover would look unfolded. Click on the image to view the report as a PDF.
Again, this is the cover, unfolded. Click to view PDF.

A few years went by before we did another report. By then, the Kollel’s northern outpost had closed, but the Kollel had started a community-building project, hiring a part-time community evangelist of sorts. The 2014 report was totally redesigned and much more colorful, although it was still printed and bound in-house. A lot of emphasis was placed on people the Kollel had brought to Cincinnati; that included hiring a photographer to take portraits of the staff and their families. The content was organized into distinctive sections, each with its own visual cues. This was such a large undertaking that the following year we followed it up with a simpler, trifold brochure – printed in color on 14″ paper, with a front panel that bore a strong similarity to the 2014 report.

You know the drill!
link to the Kollel's 2016 Annual Report
Click to view PDF

In 2016, the Kollel practically doubled in size. This was partly funded by a 24-hour online fundraising campaign, and the list of donors grew so long that for the first time we had to limit it to the current year’s honor roll – which still included anyone who had contributed at least $25 over the course of the year. The format of the report borrowed heavily from the materials I’d produced for that years’s annual event. This report was printed at a traditional print house (Springdot) and it featured a full bleed – what a luxury! The centerfold featured a composite photo of the enlarged Kollel “family.”

Link to the Kollel's 2017 Annual Report
Click to view PDF

The next year, we weren’t able to produce an annual report until the final week of the calendar year, when printers were closed for the holidays – so we had to print and bind it in-house once more. No bleeds. The visuals from the most recent fundraising materials didn’t lend themselves well to an annual report, so instead I borrowed a bit from the Kollel’s parasha sheet – including the head shots for the staff lineup, which moved to the inside back cover.

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