A Step-By-Step Guide for Planning a Yearbook

Feeling a little overwhelmed at the idea of building an entire yearbook? Here are eight easy steps to get you over the start line on your way to a successful yearbook project.

Step 1: Take a Tour of Memento Yearbook

Enjoy a 5-minute demo video tour of the features your yearbook-building tool provides.

Step 2: Build a Team

Manage your team by adding users to Memento Yearbook: teachers, parents, and students can contribute to your project with design assistance and photo contributions. 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, collaborators can 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: Yearbook Ladder Planning

Create sections to organize your book into smaller, manageable projects. 

• Consult past yearbooks and your school calendar to decide what activities, events and groups will be included in the book. Access our handy section guide to help you select the topics to include in your book. 
• Add sections to your ladder to group pages together. Feel free to download our ladder planner pdf to help you decide the order you want to present the pages. For example, create a section for the staff pages, clubs, sport teams, arts & performances, senior class memories, special activities, etc.
  Important: add placeholder sections for your portrait pages, but don't add pages to those sections until you are ready to flow the portraits in. Memento will automatically generate those pages when you use the portrait wizard. 

Step 4: Photo Collection

Set up Yearbook Photo Albums to match your sections and/or page topics, then upload any photos you have on hand. If you need to get photos from your school community, use the Community Albums to receive photos from people not working directly on the yearbook.

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 Graphic LIbrary‘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 then make any necessary changes to your portrait database (typo corrections, adding/moving students to new classrooms or grades, etc.). 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: Design Your Pages

Flow your portrait pages into your book and build candid layouts. Page creation can be as simple as using basic Memento 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: Proof and Submit Your Book

Memento Yearbook includes internal page reviewing and commenting to help make proofing team-built books easier. After all your pages are ready to move forwards towards printing, then the Editor-in-Chief may formally submit the book. Your publisher may offer access to Memento's own proofing system allowing you to review your book for final sign-off, or they may offer another tool or service.