Constructive criticism of last year’s yearbook can help assist in producing your next yearbook. Use the criteria on the checklist below, which is often used by state or national yearbook critique services, to critique your book in five categories.
Spring 2009
Distribution is an exciting time as students, faculty, parents and others look at the final product that the yearbook staff has worked so hard on all year. Yet, yearbook staffs dread a reader pointing out something in the book they do not like, or worse – errors. Like every other phase of yearbook production, plans need to be in place to handle customer concerns and complaints.
Using InDesign, you can create great effects for the images in your yearbook. Use curled page edges to create a three-dimensional, page-turning effect in InDesign.
Book critiques can help your staff learn from their work and improve their yearbook. While your staff can analyze their own book (see sidebar), another point of view is always helpful. There are a few ways to get a professional critique.
In the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, farmer Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, follows the directions of a mysterious voice to construct a baseball diamond in his cornfield. He hears a voice whisper, “If you build it, he will come.” Ray builds the baseball diamond, and the greatest heroes of his past come to play.
Similar to Ray, many yearbook advisers and their staffs create a yearbook in the hopes that students and parents will come to buy and appreciate the end result.
Using the text tools in Adobe InDesign, you can meld your words and images together with transparent text.
It’s a fact of life – students die. So do teachers. It is an emotional time for any school. But for publication staffs, emotions cannot rule your decisions. Your staff needs a clear policy so that all school deaths are handled equally, avoiding questions of favoritism.
It is true – the best way to fund your yearbook is to sell ads and yearbooks. However, organizing such sales is time-consuming, and you must compete with other groups in your school, and sometimes other schools, for those dollars. If your yearbook program is self-sustaining like mine is – the district gives us no money – the task of funding a great yearbook every year seems daunting.
The sales plan I devised and have used for years is successful for many reasons.
Every year, yearbook advisers everywhere give the usual lecture about why yearbooks are important. We stress the historical aspect of our task, remind students that they are creating the memories that we will all look back on in 20 years and how important it is to freeze the year in picture and words.
Walsworth is the first U.S. yearbook company to be granted Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS). That means FSC-certified paper that we buy comes from forests that are responsibly managed to meet supply needs now and in the future.
