Imagine a mobile phone technology that yearbook staffs could use to make the printed pages of their books more engaging. Sounds enticing, right? Many in the yearbook world agree, which is why staffs are adopting QR codes.
graphic design
Shopping malls are great places to get ideas for designs, fonts, headlines, subheads, folios, and even stories. Trips to two malls with two yearbook advisers and staff members yielded plenty of ideas for yearbooks. The ideas can be found in the Spring 2004 issue of Idea File, Volume 14, Issue 3. However, there were too many good ideas to fit in the printed issue. Here are additional images from the two trips with ideas that you may find useful.
Magazines are a major source of inspiration for designers. It takes weeks of practice for students to learn how to scour the pages for an element and use it in an entirely different manner for a unique design. Here, two yearbook students at Rancho Cucamonga High School, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., explain how they searched for design elements and how they used them in spreads.
“Lift” images off your page. You can create different versions of this effect by experimenting with elements of various sizes, gradients and feathering.
Adobe Photoshop software is a great tool for working with yearbook photographs and digital images. Like most software, it performs many functions that either cannot all be learned or do not apply to yearbook. Tutorials are great for learning more; there are some at Adobe.com, and more will be appearing in Idea File and on our website, walsworthyearbooks.com. So be prepared to hone your Photoshop skills.
Using Photoshop, you can design new and exciting backgrounds that will be unique to your yearbook because your designers created them.
Walsworth offers 43 body fonts and 71 display fonts, so the selection is plentiful. But can you get the look you want for your yearbook? We compared today’s most popular fonts with AWPC fonts, and found some resemblances. Why pay for a font when you can get a similar one for free? Here is a new perspective on AWPC fonts.
Design rules have their place in explaining the process of design and structure to beginning designers. These rules also allow readers to easily navigate each spread. It is probably better to follow them until you are ready to purposefully break them. But when rules begin to inhibit creativity by emphasizing what “should” be done over what “could” be done, it’s time to take a risk. If you can accomplish the purpose of the rules (readability, structure, balance) in different ways, you might end up creating fresh, contemporary designs with a whole new attitude. So consider these rules to break to achieve dynamic designs with personality.
n this new feature, we will take an item from a yearbook highlighted in Caught Our Eye and explain how to create it. It could be an image, a graphic or an interesting treatment, whatever we find that we think you will want to know about.
Keep color consistency in your yearbook sections, even when you have several designers, and even if not all of the colors are chosen but work needs to start as deadlines loom. Use the Swatches palette (Window > Swatches) to assign hue-independent page elements. By naming swatches based upon what they do for the design instead of color name, they are more easily managed.
