KU Voice: So long, Susan
Kansas Alumni magazine’s creative director retires after 25 years.
Gifted illustrators often find ways to artfully tweak small details, depicting a subject in surprising ways. Take a second look at our cover illustration, and you’ll see that the fishing net’s mesh resembles a computer circuit board, a subtly clever allusion to our story on researchers’ quest to discover ingredients for lifesaving drugs through advanced computing.
Credit for the illustration goes to an artist with gifts galore: our creative director, Susan Younger, f’91, whose exquisite flourishes have graced the pages of Kansas Alumni since spring 1999. With this issue, she bids farewell and begins her retirement. She wants to spend more time spoiling her grandchildren. We fervently hope she will spoil herself a bit, too.
Through 25 stellar years, Susan has poured her heart and soul into the Alumni Association. She has amassed an enviable portfolio, but one distinctive project stands out for me as the perfect emblem of Susan’s boundless inspiration and work ethic: Jayhawks on Parade, the 2003 Lawrence display of 5-foot fiberglass mascots that marched into the hearts of thousands who adore KU’s mythical bird.
Led by the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau (now Explore Lawrence), in concert with the University, the Association and Downtown Lawrence Inc., the parade featured 30 whimsical Jayhawks, created by 34 artists who submitted successful proposals for their rare birds.
Susan proposed not one bird but three—all of which were accepted. Whoosh, Mascot Miro and Peace, Love & Daisy Hill Forever became fan favorites. Valerie Spicher, j’94, our immensely talented graphic designer and Susan’s partner on countless projects for 20 years, helped paint Peace, Love & Daisy Hill Forever, which still stands as sentry outside a Central Bank of the Midwest branch in Lawrence. (Since Valerie retired in 2020, Susan has soldiered on, valiantly shouldering the work of two full-time designers.)
Years later, long after the initial parade had passed by, Susan volunteered to create her most ambitious Jayhawk, Songbird, for an auction to benefit the Association. She spent hundreds of hours in her garage, intricately placing more than 1,000 ceramic and glass tiles in glorious cascades of color, some of which spelled the words to our beloved Alma Mater.
In 2002 and 2020, Susan redesigned Kansas Alumni, creating new nameplates and visual systems to revitalize the magazine. Her offbeat ideas for eye-catching covers once led her to persuade University Architect Warren Corman, e’50, to pose for a photo by crawling through a maze of measuring tape that she and photographer Steve Puppe, j’98, had strung throughout Corman’s basement.
Susan’s talents often ventured beyond the printed page to enliven our website, email graphics, logos, direct mail campaigns, banners, Rock Chalk Ready yard signs for incoming freshmen and their families, KU shirts of all styles (including a tropical design for the Maui Classic), medallions for the Kansas Honors Program and the annual Veterans Day 5K race, and much more. For the Rock Chalk Ball in Kansas City and the Jayhawk Roundup in Wichita, she dreamed up imaginative decor and enlisted alumni and staff volunteers as her crews. For Presidents Club holiday bazaars, she made glass jewelry and holiday ornaments and painted portraits of pets that became so popular she had to turn away orders.
Susan never met a software program she didn’t yearn to learn, even if it required working long into the night. I cannot count the times she ignored my instructions to step away from her computer and go home. Mere orders from her boss were no match for her compulsion to create.
But her grandson, Levi, and granddaughter, Clara, possess superpowers I could never muster. Only they could finally lure Susan away from work. She takes with her our heartfelt gratitude for her superb talent and indomitable spirit.
Rock Chalk, dear friend, Rock Chalk.
Jennifer Jackson Sanner is editor of Kansas Alumni magazine.
Top photo courtesy of Susan Younger
Songbird Jayhawk photo by Steve Puppe
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