We’d like to start this blog post by welcoming the new yearbook coordinators, Harry and Becky, who bring their skills and experience to our team! They’ve joined us temporarily to help us during the busy season for yearbooks, which is just kicking off.

As always, we’ve been working hard to create new features that make it much easier, faster and more fun to make yearbooks! We’ve just launched an update that has provided some overhauling to photos and collages.

The first thing you’ll probably notice from this update is that you can now rate photos. This should become quite useful for yearbook editors when deciding on photos to include in the yearbook, since this should provide a good understanding of which are the most-loved photos.

You’ll also notice from the above screenshot that there are some buttons beneath the photo rating area: these are for the yearbook editors’ future reference. If there is a photo that really should be included in the yearbook, then it can be marked with a star. On the other hand, if there’s a photo that probably shouldn’t be included in the yearbook, it can be flagged.

This is the new collage submission process, where you can select the photos that you’d like our designers to include in the collages they create for your yearbook. Starred photos appear at the top of the list, flagged photos appear at the end, and everything in between is sorted by rating, from highest to lowest.

When you first load this page, the list of photos to include is automatically generated based on importance and ratings — but you’re free to adapt this to your liking. You can also use the sliders to adjust the amount of photos you’d like to display on each page, along with the amount of pages you’d like them to span over.

Finally, in the examples drawer you’ll find an assortment of collages that we’ve previously produced for other yearbooks. If you find one you like, simply click the “Use as a creative reference” button to support your creative instructions.

We hope you enjoy these new features. If you have any feedback, please do let us know!

With our advanced online system, we put you in control of the whole proofing process. No more waiting for a yearbook company to prepare, print and post pages back to you.

At any time as an editor of your yearbook can ‘Update PDF’… that is, re-create the a PDF copy of your yearbook taking into account all the changes members have made to their pages since the last time the PDF was created. You can then download the PDF, view it in your browser and even print it.

This PDF file is the exact same file we send to the printers along with a file for your yearbook’s cover.

Spot a problem with a page minutes before your deadline? Just correct the appropriate page online and ‘Update PDF’. Sooo easy.

Because often the PDF can be many tens of megabytes in file size, we highly recommend only downloading it when you absolutely need to. For many tasks, it’s more useful just to browse low-res JPG copies of all the pages online instead, using our handy page browsing feature.

Just one more reason to create your yearbooks online with AllYearbooks

For tips on making and uploading, scroll back and you’ll find Nic’s older post that tell you everything you need to know. This is just ideas, and nothing else
You can have as many or as few custom pages as you want and they will all be full colour. They don’t cost you any extra (we wouldn’t charge you for being creative). Of course they count towards your total page number, but the website can help you to keep track and keep on budget.

And ideas?

Be creative about it. Involve the other students – not just editors; open it up to the whole year. hold competitions for pages to go in, or just get a discussion going over inventive ideas. Here are some of our favourites from previous yearbooks.

• Ask the Head or Head of Year to write an introduction
• Get the yearbook committee to write a “Thank you and Goodbye” for the end of the book
• Put some message/signature pages in at the back.  This is a great way of making the book up to an even number of pages.  Either design your own or add them from the templates in All pages.
• Put a school or year photo in as one full page
• Ask someone to draw some pictures or cartoons
• Get together some quotes or funny things people have said
• Ask someone to write a diary for a school trip
• Include poems and stories people have written
• News of the year
• Adverts for local shops and businesses
• Reviews of a play or sports events

Finally, don’t forget the pages we make for you, in with the overall price!

• Make use of the online polls.  Set your own polls questions and get everyone to vote. Then have us make an awards page, or make your own.
• Create folders in the Photo gallery, have all the members upload, and give us something to make collages for you. It all make the book even better

The big thing for making your awards work is to be sure it’s inclusive and the questions are interesting for everyone in the year.

You could have a small survey at school to let people pick out polls to vote on, or to select nominees. It’s good to try to make them funny, with some in jokes about the school

With the nominees, if you’re selecting a few for each award, include as many people as possible somewhere. Don’t put the same people – or all people from one social group – up for every awards. Try to spread the nominations around. It’ll get everyone more involved!

Here are some example questions that previous customers have used in the awards. You may or may not want separate questions for male and female winners:

- Best looking
- Best dressed
- Hollywood smile
- Awesome hair award
- Biggest flirt
- Largest ego
- Drama queen
- Class clown
- Teachers’ pet
- Cutest couple
- Most likely to be a millionaire
- Most likely to win a Nobel prize
- Most likely to save the world
- Most likely to be Prime Minister
- Biggest nerd
- Most likely to become a WAG
- Best homework excuse
- Most likely to win an Olympic medal
- Funniest person
- Most likely to be on Big Brother
- The [name of school] prize for outstanding achievement in the field of excellent bestness

We just launched a completely overhauled ‘Members’ area within our yearbooks. Instead of the slow, long list of members that it used to be, the Members page is now based around a fully-featured search that allows you to quickly see, at a glance, various useful things. For instance, our system now lets you see a list of members who:

• Are in a particular yearbook group, e.g. ‘Teachers’
• Aren’t in any of your yearbook groups
• Haven’t written anything for their entry
• Haven’t uploaded a profile photo
• Who have uploaded the most photos

And that’s not all! The essence of the new system lets you simple type ‘smith’ into the search box and find all members with that name, Google-style.

To follow up from the previous blog post, this short screencast demonstrates how photo uploading works for our yearbooks. The much-demanded feature to be able to upload more than one photo at a time is here.

In the future, we plan to add a Flash-based file uploader to enable everyone to upload files on-the-fly

Recently, we upgraded the photo management so that it’s now easier to use and work with. You can now navigate between photos in a fashion similar to websites like Facebook or Flickr; whilst viewing a photo, click on it (or click the ‘next’ link) to go to the next photo in the set.

The other major improvement is the ability to upload more than one photo at a time. We now allow everyone to upload three photos at a time, and each photo file can be up to 10 MB in size. (To save time uploading, we recommend you resize all your photos with the “Large” options using Image Resizer on Windows XP.)

Other notable improvements include:

• Mass captioning and adding of descriptions
• Browsing between: all of a members’ uploaded photos, all photos in a photo folder or all photos in your yearbook
• Using left/right arrow keys to quickly flick between photos in a set
• Rotation of uploaded photos

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!

A great way to start is collecting deposits – it makes people want to try it out and it helps you know who’s interested and serious about buying. In ‘help and resources’ in the online yearbook, there’s a spreadsheet for collecting deposits and contact details and keep up with everyone who wants a yearbook.

Here’s a short crash course on getting people involved:

• The best thing to do is just get people logging on! Once they’re in the yearbook they’ll get into it.
• Book an IT room and set up all the computers (and get in some tea and a few biscuits). You can ask for permission to do it in a free period and just heave people show up and login.
• The poster in the resources has a space to write on the yearbook’s invitation code, so you could put that up in the common room.
• We also have the email invite option in ‘members’ for mass emailing – so if you get everyone’s email you can send an invitation that will take them straight to the site.
• Facebook or myspace can also be used – in particular a facebook group. Just don’t put the invite code on there, or you might get people logging in from everywhere!
• Putting a few more photo galleries with different headings will also help keep members interested
• A good place to look for tips is here in the blog. Track back through the entries! There’s other tips in the blog about getting sponsorship and other things for editors of the yearbook.

Have a go with what you can find, and ask us if you need any specific help – or if there’s a resource you’d like that we don’t provide yet!

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:-)