Helpful Tips To Beautify Your Yearbook Layouts
Yearbook crunch season is right around the corner (did it ever really leave?) and the task can be daunting. Luckily, there are plenty of best practices and hot tips out there to help you minimize stress and still create a beautiful trove of memories for families to enjoy far into the future. Here are a few favorites.
Square layouts are simple but effective!
Instagram got it right: square photos let you squeeze a lot of space out of each page. If you have a lot of photos of a particular club or activity and you are struggling to fit them all together, consider getting creative in your cropping! A collage of square photos can help maximize the number of different students on-page, a surefire way to get more sales.
Templates can be sanity-saving.
Developing unique layouts for every page is a daunting task, but Entourage has a wealth of templates to ease the load. Browse through categories like Sports, Artistic, Tropical Madness, and more to find the perfect template to make every page pop.
Play it safe with fonts.
Unique fonts can help the most important info pop off the page, but be careful of overusing them. Any headers or major breakout text should be displayed in a font that is on theme and exciting. When you go to smaller text it’s safest to use simpler fonts. Using a funky font on text smaller than 14 point runs the risk of being very hard to read! It’s always safe to fall back on a good serif font when you want to ensure readability. Grandparents everywhere will appreciate this! If you are struggling to find the perfect font, Entourage Yearbooks has a huge font database to spark your imagination.
Always use a design software!.
This probably isn’t news to most yearbook advisors and coordinators, but using software like InDesign or Acrobat is critical to creating a professional quality yearbook. If you aren’t familiar with the advanced and often complex options these programs offer, don’t fear! Entourage Yearbooks has developed EDOnline, a software specifically designed for yearbook creation. EDOnline automatically integrates with all Entourage templates and comes with a huge bank of fonts, layouts, and tools to help you get stuff done. Additionally, EDOnline is a totally web-based software that you can use from almost any device! You can even share your progress with others and grab photos with EDOnline’s social media integration. Whether you use EDOnline or another design software, make sure to experiment and play around with the tools available. You never know where the next great idea will come from!
Give students some creative freedom…
First and foremost, yearbooks are about the kids. To this end, it can be a really empowering and creatively fulfilling experience for students to work on all the aspects of yearbook creation. Make sure to let the students lead the creative charge if they show a desire to! Not only do many hands make light work, you never know what sort of unique, off the wall ideas might come from the minds of passionate students.
Above all else, creating a yearbook is about saving treasured memories and giving students and families a time capsule they can use to look back on their fondest days of school. So have fun! The memories of making it can be just as wonderful as the memories it stores. For more information about Entourage Yearbooks and the yearbook services we provide, call (888) 926-6571 or contact us online today!