As with any creative project a yearbook requires a bit of planning, but never fear as there are zillions of online tools out there to help us.
Let’s run through just a few that we, and our yearbook customers have found really useful.
- Project management tools
- Collecting yearbook content
- Yearbook design inspiration
Project management
An online project management tool is almost essential if there are more than say, three people working on your yearbook. Have you heard of the saying “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing”? Well, you’re not doing to fall into that trap!
Trello – a free and super-easy little gem of a system which demands only drag and drop. You add a card for each yearbook task, assign it to a member of your group, add a deadline and voila! Once everything reaches a ‘Done’ stage, the sense of satisfaction is better than words can express! We used Trello to plan and organise tasks for the SPC Yearbooks website, our team love it and continue using it! Other project management systems, which are a little more sophisticated include Basecamp and Teamwork, we’ve tried both, but these require a small fee to use.
Collecting yearbook content
Collecting everything together might sound a bit daunting, but believe me, it doesn’t have to be. Gone are the days of spending hours attaching and emailing individual photos (if you prefer to do this, that’s fine), but if you’ve used something like Google Drive you’ll know how easy it is to upload multiple files directly to an online storage area. Our helpful account managers will give you access to a place to do just that, drag and drop your folders of photos into the browser window, easy peasy! Alternative online storage tools include Google Drive, Dropbox, Sugarsync, Microsoft SharePoint, and I’m sure many others.
Gathering yearbook comments for profile pages has also become much much easier. We’ll give you your own online spreadsheet, so all you have to do is push out a form on email to each student and whatever they submit will be added to the online spreadsheet in real time – how easy is that?! You can quickly see who hasn’t sent a comment, and give them a few nudges of encouragement. Your account manager will set this up for you.
Design inspiration
You might not know it yet, but we’ve already helped you out here. Yearbook Creator and our online Yearbook Designer have over forty pre-designed yearbook page layouts, backgrounds, and loads of scrapbook stuff for you to get stuck in with. You can add your own artwork and create your own unique design too.
If you want to delve right in and create a yearbook design yourself, we’re very happy to help. There’s so much opportunity to get design inspiration – Pinterest is my number one go-to for ideas (for pretty much everything at the moment). Behance, (the aptly-named) Design Inspiration and Inspiration Grid all showcase lots of professional designers’ work. Even good ol’ Google Images will help you out of the dark depths of an uninspired mind!
Create your own Pinterest boards, or bookmark some ideas on Evernote, however suits you, then go for a walk as I find this helps your own original ideas start to flow.
That’s all for now, happy yearbooking!
