Yearbook Theme Ideas
Robin Yearbook Author

Yearbook theme ideas – viva vintage chic

viva vintage Polaroids

Fun, free-spirited and fashionable – the vintage-look is extremely popular at the moment. Here are yearbook theme ideas and design tips based around vintage chic and patriotic artwork for your yearbook. 

Original vintage vs modern vintage yearbook themes

Yearbooks from the 1920s to the 1960s are fascinating to browse – the clothes, haircuts and general design and style of the yearbooks. If you’re looking for clean and simple vintage design inspiration, these are great to look at. Colour pages were a rare novelty back in those days, so how lucky are we to have full colour yearbooks these days? 

If you would prefer to use more modern vintage artwork in your yearbook, choose pastel colour backgrounds (blue, green, grey, purple, orange, pink, brown, etc.) and vintage influence patterns such as polka dots, candy stripes, stars, checks, etc.

Why not crown those victorious on your awards page? Design your own crown to incorporate into the yearbook page. Elaborate, decorative photo frames fit perfectly with any vintage yearbook theme – use frames in your montage pages and/or for each student photo on your profile pages.

Patriotic vintage theme – using flags

Incorporate flags into your vintage yearbook design – this could be bunting across the top of each yearbook page or across the middle to break the page up into sections.

Use flag artwork for your background – for a touchable, textured appearance use a canvas or fabric printed flag, or manipulate your flag using photo-editing software to achieve a texture effect (in Photoshop use Filters).

Add flags as decorative items to your yearbook pages. If you are an international school, why not include each students’ flag as part of their profile page or section?

Vintage chic and glamorous styling elements

Decorative yearbook design elements such as velvet, pearls, diamonds and feathers offer oodles of options for fans of fashion and vintage design and create the perfect setting for a glamorous prom page, or a romantic tone for yearbook couples’ pages.

Find some suitable heavy material, such as velvet. Either photograph it or use a scanner (make sure your settings are ‘best quality‘ or at least 300 dpi) to create your image to load into Yearbook Hub’s Manage Photos page and include in your own yearbook design.

Photograph pearls (either on their own or strung pearls such as a necklace) and other jewels. Remove the image background in image editing software, such as Photoshop and save as a .png to retain the transparency. These can be used as part of photo frames, for the folio (page number) or just scattered on your page for interest.

For a very vintage chic yearbook design, use lace around the edge of each page or use as frames for photos or comments. Ribbons and bows are also great for page decoration – again, scan or photograph the items you wish to use and remove the image background before saving as a .png with a transparent background.

Elegant script fonts work well with glamorous style yearbook designs. We recommend using script/decorative fonts for short text entries such as page titles and names, but use a font that is easy to read (such as Arial, Helvetica or Calibri) for longer text entries.

How best to create a vintage theme design – top 5 tips

In Yearbook Hub there are plenty of vintage yearbook theme ideas to play with and a wealth of resources for inspiration:

  1. Look at fashion and home-style magazines.
  2. Put the word ‘vintage’ into a search engine and browse through some of the sites for design ideas.
  3. If there are any vintage fairs happening near you, visit them for ideas and get you hands on some truly vintage bits and bobs to use in your design, such as buttons, lace, ribbon, vintage fashion magazine pages, etc.
  4. Looking for yearbook page background ideas? Take a look at www.cathkidston.co.uk and check out some vintage revived patterns.
  5. Ask your family if they have anything from the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s or 80’s which would be suitable to use.

The key to achieving the vintage look is to use layering, similar to a scrapbook yearbook theme. Choose a range of patterned material backgrounds (or for something slightly more minimal try polka dots or candy stripes) and layer objects like buttons, string, luggage tags, old postage stamps, bunting and anything else you find that you wish to include, over the top.

In previous design-related posts I have recommended sticking to 3 colours and keeping your yearbook design consistent throughout – with a vintage design theme you can almost throw the rule book out of the window! (I say almost as you still ideally need to keep things like student profile pages and other layouts the same on each page). Mixed patterns, colours and objects are actually part of the charm of vintage style.

We would love to know how you get on with this or any of our other yearbook theme design ideas. Leave a comment below or email us.

Robin Yearbook Author

Robin

SPC Yearbook Designer

At SPC Yearbooks I create graphic content for yearbooks and leavers' products. I love school yearbooks because the sky's the limit when it comes to creativity and imagination. I'm originally from Canada - I miss the mountains but not the cold!

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