Make Your Yearbook Great
The Key to a Great Yearbook is in the Elements Around You.
This article gives yearbook advisors tips to make their publications unique.
How do you make your school’s yearbook great? You add words, personality and a splash of contrast. Use the following tips to make your yearbook a work of art.
Take Advantage of the Text
Most of the time students don’t like to read, but they love to read yearbooks. Many elementary schools do not like to use articles in their yearbooks because of the lack of writing power available to them. The advisor usually doesn’t have time to write pieces for the yearbook, and the students are too young to make a substantial written contribution.
However, yearbook advisors should rethink this option. Students read their yearbooks all year long. It makes complete sense to add some sort of small written piece to each page. You can manage this task easily by giving a brief description of what makes each class unique or different from the others. You don’t need to have a 500-word piece on each page to accomplish this goal. Request that each teacher submit a three to five sentence description about what makes his or her class great. You can have them email it to you, and then you can copy and paste the text where applicable. Bingo, no writing is required on your part.
To give each page personality, you can also select a special student or teacher from each class to highlight. This person may have a special skill or talent like playing the bagpipes or juggling. You may even want to add a joke or two to each club section such as music, sports and academics to spice up the yearbook. Giant print is not off limits, so don’t be afraid to jumbo size your text.
Personalize It
You can inject your yearbook with style by personalizing it. No, not by engraving the yearbooks with each student’s name. One option could be adding student artwork or poetry inside the yearbook or on the cover. Make your book unique by adding elements of family life. Have students bring in pictures of trips and vacations. Allow them to include photos of their social functions and outings away from school.
This gives the reader a sense of what makes your community tick. It allows the students within the school to be comforted and visitors to get a sense of what your community is like. Another way to add personality to your yearbook is to incorporate themes. Get ideas for thematic elements from school locations, school-wide goals or school milestones.
Use Contrast
Contrast works wonders for a yearbook, especially for books that don’t use much color. Contrast allows pages to pop without investing in expensive software and color pages. You may consider using black backgrounds with white letters. Use stripes, circles and shapes to bring attention to text. Yearbooks that do use color can contrast light and dark colors. Consider adding borders and arrows to make photos and text stand out.
It is not hard to make yearbooks fun, but it takes a little effort, creativity and brainstorming to make them engaging. The next time you sit down to plan your school’s yearbook, look at the elements around you. The missing element for that great yearbook may be right in front of your face.
