Yearbook Planning Guide

Being in charge of your school’s yearbook is a big job and a big responsibility, but it all becomes much easier once you have a solid plan in place. Start making your plan as early in the school year as possible, and set yourself – and the whole yearbook project – up for success.

Yearbooks are a beloved and long-standing tradition, so their conventions are well-known. Start with a list of all the essential yearbook contents, such as profile pages, academic and extracurricular showcases, fun quotes, and autograph pages. Then, brainstorm special features and customize design details to make your yearbook unique. Whether it’s your first yearbook or you’re an experienced pro, every yearbook manager can simply follow these steps to create an amazing finished product that all the students will love.

From yearbook planning to handing out your fantastic finished books, this comprehensive yearbook planning guide will help you handle the project with ease. As a smart first step, fill out our school yearbook volume form or email sales@mixbook.com. You’ll receive a speedy quote from a dedicated representative who will assist you every step of the way.

Establish a yearbook committee

While many photo books are fun solo projects, yearbooks call for teamwork. The size of your team can vary considerably with the size of the school and scope of the project. It could be just a couple of parent volunteers, or dozens of students overseen by several teachers.

Every yearbook team needs a manager or advisor, typically a teacher or parent volunteer, whose first task is to establish a yearbook committee. Start with an introductory meeting for prospective team members, at which you can discuss different roles and brainstorm ideas for the yearbook.

Tip: Bring copies of previous yearbooks to your first meetings. It’s helpful to browse the books and see what works best, and what could be improved.

Student committee members

At the high school and middle school levels, students are very capable of taking on important tasks in all areas. Doing so will help them develop valuable and varied skills. Older elementary school kids can definitely get involved too, as can younger students through supervised projects.

Yearbook committee roles

No matter the type of school or size of your yearbook committee, the essential roles are always broadly the same and fall into the following departments:

• Business and managerial: This department oversees the logistics of the project including the yearbook planning calendar, deadlines, budget, payment, and distribution.
• Photography: Your school might hire a professional photographer for portrait shots, but team members are needed to take and gather additional photos, organize photo files, and edit images.
• Editorial: The editorial department handles the written contents of the yearbook, such as page headers, captions, quotes, and written features such as interviews. Editors also handle proofreading and ensure a consistent writing style throughout the yearbook.
• Design: The design department works on the visual elements of the yearbook, such as layouts, colors, accents, cover design, and more.
• Sales and marketing: If your yearbook plan includes selling ads, whether it’s to local businesses or parents, the committee needs a sales department to manage it all. Marketing roles are also important for promoting sales of the yearbook itself.

Sometimes one individual will take on multiple roles, while other roles might be divided among several team members. Many tasks require collaboration between different departments. A photographer might accompany a reporter, for example, and the sales team will collaborate with the design team on ad placement.

Check out this other helpful yearbook planning guide: How to Collaborate on School Yearbooks in Real Time

Create your yearbook schedule

With your yearbook committee established close to the beginning of the school year (ideally), you have plenty of time to create an incredible yearbook. One of the most important tasks for the yearbook manager is to keep the whole team on schedule. At one of your first committee meetings, create a calendar to keep everyone on track. A shared, cloud-based calendar is ideal as you can update it and send notifications throughout the school year.

Tip: Your Mixbook rep will help establish printing deadlines and assist in planning the broader schedule.

Your schedule should list all the essential yearbook tasks, the team or team member responsible for them, and the deadline. Here are some general guidelines for a yearbook schedule:

• August/September: Establish the yearbook committee, assign roles, create an initial list of essential yearbook content plus potential content ideas.
• October-December: Gather and organize photos and editorial content, choose a theme plus design and layout options, finalize the content plan, finalize ad sales and submissions.
• January-February: Create the first draft of the yearbook, identify and resolve any missing photos or editorial content.
• March-April: Finalize the draft, proofread, and prepare for printing.
• April-June: Implement marketing and sales strategy, plan for distribution and celebration.

Your own yearbook planning schedule will be much more detailed, and each department might develop their own calendar. Cross-reference your yearbook calendar with the school’s academic and extracurricular calendars to plan photography and editorial coverage of important events. For example, you’ll need to cover major sports events, awards ceremonies, special project presentations, science fairs, field trips etc. This might mean assigning a photographer and reporter to the event, or simply asking the teacher to share their photos.

Choose a theme

The yearbook manager and design team should start browsing Mixbook’s 75-plus, 100% customizable yearbook themes as early in the planning process as possible. You don’t have to pick a theme immediately, but these expertly designed yearbooks will inspire your own content, layout, and design ideas. Look through a range of different themes and figure out which design elements are the best fit for your school.

Filter the themes by color or by school category, such as preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school, private school, or homeschool. Each category includes various aesthetic styles, from cute and colorful to modern and refined. Remember, everything is customizable, so you can replace a theme’s color scheme with your school colors, add or delete stickers, change page orders or layouts, and add as many pages as you need.

Make a content plan

In addition to looking at design styles, browsing yearbook themes is helpful for generating content ideas. To write your yearbook content plan, start with the essential pages that define every yearbook. These include:

• A welcome message, usually from the principal
• Portrait pages: Photos and names of every student in each grade or classroom, typically in a grid format. The teacher is usually featured as well, and you might include a group shot.
• The graduating class should receive special attention in the yearbook. Senior quotes are a popular inclusion. Brainstorm ways for your yearbook to honor its senior students in their final year.
• Faculty and staff pages: Everyone who works at the school, including all teachers and support staff, should be acknowledged with their photos and names.
• Academics: Some pages of the yearbook should focus on academic achievements, such as awards, valedictorians, honor roll, and big projects.
• Extracurriculars: Dedicate pages or spreads to sports, clubs, music, arts, and other extracurriculars.
• School events: Ensure coverage of your school’s major annual events such as dances, festivals, fundraisers, and holiday celebrations.
• Candid photos: Capture student life around campus with fun shots of day-to-day activities. These pages could be organized around special editorial features, such as “what’s your dream career?” or “who is your biggest idol?”
• Autograph pages: Leave plenty of blank pages at the back of the book for students to collect autographs and personal messages at the end of the year.
• Advertisements and sponsorships: Some yearbooks include ads or sponsorships from local businesses. Others offer parents the option to buy ad space for congratulatory messages to their students. Ads can be placed throughout the book, or on dedicated pages toward the back.

Your yearbook can also include any additional, age-appropriate features your team chooses. Imagine students looking at their yearbooks many years after graduation, and how you might capture memories of these school days. Here are just a few ideas:

• A “coolest classroom” contest.
• “Then and now” with photos of students from the first day of school next to more recent ones.
• “Four seasons of school,” capturing a scenic spot on campus at different times of the year e.g. with snow, sunshine, fall leaves, and spring blossoms.
• A page about your school’s history with old photos.
• Trends of the year e.g. the biggest music stars, movies, fashions etc.
• The year’s biggest news and entertainment headlines.

Collect photographs and images

Starting as soon as possible, the photography department should gather and take all the necessary photos to achieve your content plan. Save the best photos shared with the school’s communication app, ask faculty to forward their photos to the yearbook committee, and assign photographers to cover events and take candid photos of campus life.

Your photography team should also have a method for organizing and tagging photos. A cloud-based photo management service like Google Photos (which is integrated into the Mixbook platform) is handy for this. Some basic editing of photos, for example cropping and lightening, can be done in the Mixbook Studio. Your team might also use a photo editing program such as Photoshop for processing before uploading to your yearbook project.

Write captions and other text

From page headers to captions, all the text in a yearbook needs to be written by the editorial team. An editor should collaborate with the photography team to ensure all the names match the right portrait shots, and be certain that name spellings are correct. Editors might also collaborate with the design team on typography decisions.

Work on keeping a consistent editorial style throughout the book. For example, choose if your page headers and subheads will be in sentence case or all-caps, and stick with it throughout the yearbook. Do you have some captions in past tense (“Theo Smith scored the winning goal”) and others in present tense (“Sara Martinez plays trombone at the talent show”)? Decide on a consistent tense for all captions and edit the text as needed.

Tip: Your editorial team can take advantage of Mixbook Studio’s AI-Generated Captions tool.

Design the yearbook

The beauty of Mixbook’s yearbook themes is that the professional designs are at your fingertips – simply drag and drop your images into place, edit the text, and admire your almost-finished book. Of course, your design team might want to change up design elements, and that’s easy to achieve, too.

In the Mixbook Studio™ space, use the panels on the left to make any desired changes to your yearbook. These panels include:

• Photos: Upload photos, either as one single batch or in smaller batches, to drag and drop into the yearbook theme. Then, click on the photos to open more editing options.
• Layouts: Try different layouts for each page or spread, or use the Auto-Layouts tool to see recommended options.
• Backgrounds: Change background colors or patterns, or upload your own background images.
• Stickers: See suggested stickers for your theme, browse the whole catalogue of stickers, or upload your own. These are custom design accents to give your yearbook more character.
• Text: Add text boxes, change the appearance of text, and try out the AI caption tool in this panel.

Proofreading and revisions

Once your yearbook design is complete, allow plenty of time for proofreading and revisions. The editorial team should check all text for spelling and grammar, as well as consistency in style. The design and photography team should make sure all photos are in focus, appropriate to the page, and not placed in the gutter (the seam down the center of the book created by its binding).

It’s a good idea to have more than one person proofread the book before it goes to print. Typos and minor errors are easy to miss, especially when you’re near the end of the long yearbook project and eager to finish it.

Manage deadlines, budgets and printing

Your managerial department should be ready to take over as soon as the final yearbook design has been approved. Make sure the number of pages, book size, cover option, and paper options are all priced within your budget.

Your Mixbook representative will provide a custom coupon code, which you will use to place your order. If your school is tax exempt, pass that information along to your rep. After you place your yearbook order, you will receive your books within two weeks.

Marketing and sales

The marketing and sales department handles sales of the yearbook to students, parents, and any other stakeholders who might want a copy. You should be set up to take pre-orders as well as in-person sales once you have the yearbooks in hand. Marketing could include sending emails, using the school’s app, passing out flyers, and adding messages to the school newsletter. Use multiple techniques over the last month or two of the school year.

Final steps: Distribution and celebration!

Your yearbooks are ready to hand out to students, so it’s time to celebrate! Your yearbook team might organize a small party for its members, or a bigger yearbook signing party for the whole school.

Ready for a yearbook quote?

Kick off your yearbook project by heading to the Mixbook education page. Enter your information and an expert yearbook representative will reach out with a quote and further assistance within 24 hours.