Around four years ago, The Varsity’s creative team first started gathering ideas for a visual equity guide. The guide would set out general concerns and best practices for the illustrations and photography that would bring life, in its full colour, to our pages. 

However, it was not until May 2024, with the pro-Palestine student encampment at King’s College Circle, that the Volume 145 creative team felt that The Varsity urgently needed one. 

Whereas the institutional knowledge of previous management members may have been enough, the new team, starting their jobs two days prior to the encampment, quickly understood that our known processes and practices needed tweaking. Even though our Equity Guide outlines various practices in equitable reporting, we had little written down on how to approach creating visuals while minimizing harm with the student community in mind.

So, after a year of research and deliberation with The Varsity’s Equity Board, the Visuals Equity Guide will launch on April 8. 

Every single article at The Varsity — short or feature length — has an accompanying visual. Every visual must aim to not overpower the narrative of a story, but to complement it. Ultimately, our visuals encompass an eternal digital footprint that must not be held as secondary to any other content published on our website or social media. 

The Varsity, as a not-for-profit corporation, doesn’t have to provide sensationalist imagery to pull in and engage our viewers; instead, we have more leeway in working to create equitable visuals, and to concern itself with the pursuit — a must for all publications.  

All of our visuals are created by a diverse body of U of T students, with different backgrounds, fields of study, and experience. Beautiful work has been created precisely because of the range of contributors that grace our newspaper pages. 

However, even while conducting research this year, we have made mistakes. We recognized how easy it is to illustrate a stereotype without even realizing it exists, or to capture a last-minute photograph that failed to capture the nuances of an article. 

We created this guide to streamline our visual processes while keeping equity in mind. In it, you will find general principles, photography-specific practices, illustration-specific practices, a new policy on website visuals accessibility, and an explanation of our unpublishing process for visuals. To provide more clarity, we have included case studies — examples of what to pursue or avoid — to supplement the best practices expressed throughout the guide, as well as a reference library with an assortment of online resources that provide further guidance on specific topics. 

While the guide describes how to empower instead of diminish its subjects, it is called a guide for a reason. We cannot create an ultra-specific, all-inclusive manual for how to handle each type of article and visual, as they contain vast complexities and concerns. 

Instead, the guide serves to highlight the limitations that The Varsity may have, explain how to address them, and seeks to further highlight avenues of harm reduction. By allowing our creatives the freedom to work around these limitations — set to protect and serve the community while practicing journalistic integrity — they can push boundaries and capture student life in its various forms.  

We hope that by writing on visual equity, our team, future contributors, and fellow visual journalists will have a guide to practices to include, empower, and fairly depict U of T’s different communities. The Varsity’s creative team is to continuously work with the document, and our Masthead will refer to it for guidance during the process of planning, creating, and publishing visuals.

But the guide isn’t complete, yet — nor ever. As a living document, the Visuals Equity Guide is to be continuously worked on and expanded by The Varsity’s Equity Board alongside our Editorial Equity Guide. As previously overlooked equity concerns are reconsidered and new, yet-to-be-identified issues emerge with time and social progress, it’s important that the guide remains as comprehensive and open to discussion as possible to inform our visual direction for the paper and ensure our community members feel seen.

We’d like to especially emphasize that latter half: ensuring our community members feel seen. Once the guide is published, we invite you to tell us what you think, both positive and negative, about our guide and visuals. Students, faculty, and staff at U of T from all walks of life are welcome to provide feedback on how to represent them fairly and accurately, and the next Equity Board will be taking all comments and critiques into consideration.

As a paper for the U of T community, we want to make sure that our readers and contributors have an opportunity to shape the paper as they see fit — after all, it’s only equitable. 

— Kaisa Kasekamp, Creative Director and Ajeetha Vithiyananthan, Managing Editor, Internal

Volume CXLV