If you are not sure how you want your book to look yet, you can always try a few things out. Our site is really flexible so you can change almost everything you do. For example changing your profile page layout, colours, adding and deleting photos and lots more.  If you already have some ideas for how you want your book to look but don’t know where to start, either pop them in an email to us or give us a ring. We’ll be happy to talk them through with you:-)

It’s a good job we have our own online chat within the yearbooks, we’re never off line

In design terms bleed is when any image or element on a page touches the edge of the page and extends beyond the trim edge, leaving no margin.  Helpful eh and whats a trim edge?!

Basically what it means is that your pages are printed onto paper that is a bit bigger than A4 and then trimmed down to size. But this process isn’t 100% accurate.  If your page has a white background and no elements (photos, text, clip art) that go right up to the edges then you will never notice.  But if you do have an element that goes right up to the edge – say a pink page background, then when the page is trimmed you might end up with a tiny white margin around the edge of your page.

Designers get over this by making their pages slightly bigger than A4 and bleeding things like background colour into this area outside the A4 page.  If you want a page element to bleed off of your page, set up your page to be 216mm x 303mm, this will give you 3mm of bleed all the way round your page.

If you don’t want page elements to bleed or be trimmed then keep them about 5mm in from the edge of your A4 page.  This is called the margin (if you are now thoroughly confused skip to the end and look at the ‘really simple guide to page design’!)

Another thing to think about when you are designing a page is the gutter.  This is a wider margin 15mm, on the edge of the page that will be towards the spine of the book.  Because books don’t lay flat when they are open this margin needs to be wider so your important page elements don’t disappear into the spine.  Stitched folded paperback yearbooks are an exception to this (well there has to be one!) because they do lay flat when they are open so nothing is lost in the spine.

So things to think about when designing pages are:- bleed, do you want elements to bleed off of the edge of a page, margin, keep important elements 5mm from the edge of the page, and gutter, keep important elements 15mm from spine edge of the page. The diagram below demonstrates all of these things.

Lots of things to think about eh?

The really simple guide to page design

• Keep all your important page elements (faces and text) 15mm from all the edges of your page
• Make sure your page is A4 (not US letter size)

If you do this your pages will look great:-)  If you want to add bleed elements that’s great but you really don’t have to make a funky looking page, it is much more important to be able to read all the text!

One of the things that can hold up making a cover is getting a good quality crest or photos, so don’t leave it too late to start looking for a crest you might want to include.  A logo or crest lifted off a school website is almost always NOT going to be high enough quality.

Covers fall into 2 categories, leather effect and paperback/laminated hardback.  For leather effect yearbooks you have an area of around 12x12cm on the front of the book for your design.  The design is in a single colour and normally your crest and the name of your school.

For paperback and laminated hardback yearbooks you have both the front and the back cover to design   How much we do and how much you do yourself is up to you.

Here are some ideas for covers

• a grid of photos of all the members in the book
• school logo/crest
• name of the school
• ‘Class of 2009′ or ’2009 Yearbook’ or similar text
• a few words about who made the book
• a hand-drawn or painted design
• lots of relevant bits and pieces put on a piece of paper and scanned
• a photo of the school
• a photo of the whole year group
• photos around school
• names of all students (sometimes put within a large ’09′)

If you want us to do any work on your yearbook cover remember to give us lots of detail like colours, fonts, text, or if you want us to be creative we can make the choices for you:-)

If you are making the cover your self make sure that they’re:

• A4 size (NOT Letter size)
• 300dpi (around 2,554 x 3,583 pixels)

If you are a bit stumped for ideas then why not have a yearbook cover competition! It’s a great way to get everyone involved in the book:-)

• Remember to upload the highest quality photos you have.  Some mobile phone photos are not high resolution and can look blurry as large pictures.
• If you don’t want to go over your 10 free collages, think about having 2 or 3 folders of pictures on one page.  This works best if you only have a few (number?) picture in each folder. When you submit the folders, just tell us in the in instructions that “X” folder should be put on one page with “Y” folder.
• Remember, a double page spread counts as 2 pages!
• Remember, the more photos you want on one page the smaller they will be!  100 is about the most you can have on one page and still see them clearly but we can put more on a page if you want!
• If you are feeling creative you can give us some direction on how you want your collages to look.  If not, we can get creative for you!
• You might want to use the option for limiting how many picture each person can upload if you think you might end up with 100s and 100s!!
• Once you have submitted your folder you can’t add more pictures to the collage

You don’t need to wait until all your other yearbook pages are ready, you can close a folder ready for us to make the collage when ever you’re ready and we can start work on them as soon as we have your £200 deposit.

The new year is going to bring a few changes to the site.  Jake and Jamey have been beavering away on a new look for the site that will make setting up your books even easier and as we’ve mentioned before there will be lots more profile page templates coming your way too:-)

Keep your eye’s on the blog for more news!

Have fab 2009!

In fact working on new templates is mine and David’s big task for the next few weeks.  We’re off for a well earned rest for a couple of days but we’ll be back on the case asap with our creative heads firmly screwed on!

What ever you are celebrating have a good one!

Whilst Jake and Gem took Ewa out for lunch Jamey and David had far too much fun with the toys in the crackers…  a game of mini frisbee had them leaping over armchairs in a most athletic way… I don’t think I have seen either of them move that fast!

Meanwhile I am eying up which of the lovely sweets I can take home…..

Order more copies, the more you order the less they cost per book! Every year we have people who want to get extra copies because they sold like hot cake on the day and now everyone wants one.  But ordering a few books at a time means the price per book goes up!  Tell your Head or Principal that you are making a book and get them to order a few for the school, we’ve had great feedback from schools that have shown them to PTA and councils meetings.

We are not big fans of advertising in yearbooks but we do like to support our local community and we’d encourage you to do the same:-)  So think about approaching your local shops and businesses and have a few pages of adverts in your book.

Here are a few things to think about:

• Decide how many pages of adverts you want and where you want them in the book
• Have different charges for full, half and quarter page adverts
• Try approaching small businesses near your school that have an interest in student business

But how much do you charge?! Well, how much do you want to pay for your books (realistically!) and how much will they actually cost, the difference will give you an idea of how much you need to raise with advertising.

If you don’t want to approach businesses for advertising try organizing a fund raising event.  We’ve just spent 10mins brainstorming and here’s what we came up with… car wash, sponsored walk/run/bike ride, bake cakes, hold a raffle or car boot sale (there are bound to be one or two things you get for Christmas that you don’t want!)… what ever you can think of!

And if you do hold a fund raising event, let us know how it went and we’ll make a list of ideas and add it to the editors resources:-)

David and I have also been having a mammoth game of truth or dare jenga! So far no winners but I have proved I can pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time and David wants to be stranded on a desert island with McGiver!