You may be new to yearbook design or have students who are. Or, designing may be your favorite part of production and you have been doing it for years. Either way, a good grounding in basics is essential. Like those mazes with the start and finish points, fundamentals get you where you need to go — in this case, the creation of an appealing page that makes the reader want to linger over it.
Fall 2003
I suffered from deadline dread my first year as adviser of The Spinnaker at Laney High School. Despite those early days when pages were turned in the day of shipping for the mad dash to the plant, I have survived and learned from my mistakes. While I still have a lot to learn about yearbook publishing, I have come to understand that deadlines are a necessary evil.
Veteran advisers look back at their first year or two and wish someone had warned them about what can go wrong. Here are some of the more common issues that advisers face, and tips for avoiding or resolving them. We tried to come up with a list of the Top Ten Pitfalls to Avoid, but we can’t count, so here Mike Frazier’s article with help from advisers Renae Goldie, Amy Morgan and Danielle Bradley, and yearbook representative Karen Ray.
The new editor could visualize it: a pink and purple yearbook cover with a castle and the words, “Once Upon a Time….”
Walsworth has created three collections of pre-designed pages and page elements that can be customized for your yearbook. Designer Series and Designer Series Plus layouts are pre-designed for Adobe® PageMaker®, Adobe® InDesign® and QuarkXPress™ users. The layouts are available for every section of the yearbook.
Kids need structure. It may sound like a cliché, but no one knows this to be true more than a yearbook staff. Without a plan of what goes where and when, a yearbook staff will stumble blindly from deadline to deadline.
Call your customer service representative for questions and problems concerning your yearbook. Your CSR is a valuable resource who knows where to go for the answers to your questions. CSRs are located in the pre-press plant, with access to your yearbook during the production process.
Before you pick up the phone to call your Walsworth yearbook representative and schedule your first visit of the year, stop. There are a few things you can do ahead of time to help make that first visit go smoothly, and make sure your time is used well.
Money raised from ad sales at Shaler Area High School, Pittsburgh, Pa., has continued to increase over the years based on the idea that the more motivated salespeople you have, the more money you can raise.
Each year, advisers and staffs work to develop a theme to unify their yearbook and make it a reflection of the school and students during that particular year. This is one of the most daunting tasks of the entire production process. Themes do not magically appear. It takes thought and hard work. And theme development itself has a process.
