How to Plan an Incredible School Yearbook

School yearbooks don't just happen. By laying a solid foundation at the beginning of the year, life becomes much less hectic, you set the yearbook staff up to succeed, learn skills they will use later in life, and you produce an incredible high-quality yearbook.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• A yearbook representative from a reputable yearbook company
• Computers
• Adobe InDesign
• A yearbook Team
• Creative minds

1. If possible, round up your yearbook staff/class a week before the school year begins and hold workshops to help lay the foundation for the yearbook. This will help you and your team to solidify decisions that will set the tone for the year's production.
2. Train your staff on the design software. Just go through the basic functions and allow them some play time. They will learn more in the process of creating the actual yearbook.
3. Create a ladder. This is the document that shows what event/subject will be on each page. You may want to have your executive editor or yourself create this before the actual workshop week.
4. Have the yearbook team brainstorm theme ideas. Then, as the ideas are whittled down, choose a solid theme to build the yearbook around. If the team is torn between theme ideas, your executive editor makes the final decision.
5. Develop the theme. To bring out the theme, you will need to decide on the main color scheme of the book, graphics, any special treatment of photos, folio tabs (page numbers w/ art), and any thing else that will help your book be unique. For example, a book reflecting the growth of a school may choose "Breaking Through" as their theme. They may choose the look of something tearing through a fabric or paper. They could use this image on the cover and carry it through on the folio tabs as well. Perhaps they'll decide to include photos that look like they're torn on the edges and even have torn endsheets.
6. Choose up to three fonts. One font should be your design font, preferably one that is a bit artsy and reflects the theme. It will more than likely be used as the titles to your pages and your cover. Then, choose one or two other fonts for your copy, captions, subtitles and quotes. Be sure to differentiate your captions from your body copy enough that they don't compete with each other. You can vary these by using italics and bold (if the font is created in these alternate version) and/or by font size.
7. Brainstorm cover design ideas. Don't skimp on this. Your cover will be seen more than any other part of the book. Carefully choose your layout and your graphics for this. Options for the cover include textures, embossing, debossing, cutouts, foil metallic ink, laminate ink (clear) and metal lay. Your yearbook representative can give you more options as well.
8. Meet with your yearbook representative. After you have your theme elements together, meet with your yearbook rep. She will be able to give you some advice and help weed out some decisions that are still not complete. She may also be able to present new printing ideas that you could implement. Before she comes, ask her to bring samples of textures, inks and papers you and your team can look at to make decisions about the cover and endsheets.
9. Next, build your templates as soon as possible. Templates include everything that will appear in every page of the yearbook. In some cases, this will be just the folio tab. But, in "Character Styles" or "Paragraph Styles" of Adobe InDesign, you should also add the specific size and style of fonts that will appear on everyone's page, as well as the colors (I have a "how-to" link for this below). This will keep consistency throughout the book. If a team members places his copy on a page, all he will need to do is highlight it and click the "body copy" selection in the "Paragraph Styles" and it will automatically become Garamond, 12 point (or whatever font you've set it to.)
10. Set in-house deadlines. These deadlines should be well before the yearbook plant's deadline. Most yearbook companies charge for missing their deadlines, so setting your deadlines earlier than theirs is a good practice. Make sure each team member has a clear awareness of his or her deadlines. Also, be sure to include consequences if these deadlines are missed. It's important that students learn the importance of meeting deadlines in the print world.

Tips & Warnings

• Make your executive editor work. She should be involved in recruiting and motivating and problem-solving as much as possible. This is a leadership role and she will learn a lot if she applies herself in this position.
• Colors often appear different from printer-to-printer and monitor-to-monitor. To be sure you have chosen the colors your team really wants, you should consult a Pantone color wheel. These contain the specific CMYK or RGB mix that you can add to your templates to ensure consistency. Ask your yearbook rep for more details. I know of one school who decided on a blue based on their computer print-outs and the final product came back purple.
• Reward your staff. Have a Saturday production day and order pizza. Hold an awards ceremony or banquet at the end of the year and include both serious and humorous awards.
• Don't miss your deadlines. The results could be costly and delay the delivery of your book.