Eight Steps to Yearbook Completion

Step 1: Take a Tour of Stoodio Yearbook

Enjoy a quick video tour of the features your yearbook building tool provides. Investing a little time in an overview will save you hours of self-teaching frustration.

Step 2: Build a Team

Find collaborators to help you work on your yearbook project: teachers, parents, and students can contribute to your project. Add users to Stoodio’s members to help with the design process. Reach out to staff and volunteers to ask for photo contributions for special events and daily school life. If you plan on creating special sections, such as superlatives, baby pictures, surveys on popular trends with your students, or run a yearbook cover design contest, find collaborators to help you gather the resources necessary to build these special pages. Enlist a proofreader or two, and make sure that you know who has final sign-off on your book.

Step 3: Book Organization

Create sections to organize your book into manageable smaller projects. Consult past yearbooks and your school calendar to see what activities and groups will be included in the book. Learn more about book ladder management.

Step 4: Photo Collection

Collect candid photos to include in your book. Create Events and Media Collections on your Community Stream to capture your memories.

Step 5: Create a Simple Design Plan

Keeping your design plan simple is an effective way to manage your production time. The more decisions made before page design begins, the quicker you can build your book.

• Choose a theme for your entire book or for individual sections. (Check out the Studio Source Catalog‘s theme collections for inspiration!)
  Create a simple 2-4 color palette, or focus on your school’s colors.
• Preselect a small collection of coordinating backgrounds. Use one style per section or theme the entire book.
• Limit your clipart to a specific style or theme to avoid clutter.
• Select a font styling for your page titles and paragraph text, either on a per section basis or for the entire book.

Step 6: Import Portraits

Import your portraits with their database file. By having information attached to your portraits, you’ll be able to use special tools to auto-format your portrait pages into alphabetized labelled grids.

Step 7: Create your Pages

Flow your portrait pages, and build candid layouts. Page creation can be as simple as using premade layouts with your photos for a clean and simple book, or you can create your own personal work of art with decorative elements, themed backgrounds and photo effects. 

Step 8: Review & Approve

Review and approve your complete pages, then request to submit your book to the Studio Source Dashboard for final proofing. After your book has been approved, your studio will place the order.