Student Pages
There are no two ways around this, student pages are vital. There are a lot of important pages in a yearbook, but student pages are in a league of their own. Other pages can be amazing and can really contribute to the overall value of your yearbook, but if we are being honest, the yearbook just wouldn’t exist without student pages.
It is therefore incredibly important that you get the students pages right. You can’t just take a ‘meh, that will do’ attitude with these pages, they need to be good. To make sure you create some awesome student pages you need to ask yourselves a few questions:
- How are you going to order the student profiles?
- Do you want the pictures to be themed?
- How many students do you want on each page?
- What do you want the comments to include?
How are you going to order the student profiles?
So this one is quite easy, in alphabetical order. Sure there are other methods of ordering things but this is by the far the most common, so we’re not even going to recommend another way. Just decide whether you are going to order by first name or surname (surname is more common but it really doesn’t matter either way) and then use Microsoft Word or Excel to put them into alphabetical order. (The button in the tool bar with an A above a Z and a downward pointing arrow will do all the hard work for you.)
Do you want the pictures to be themed?
Student profiles generally include pictures and then some sort of comment. But whilst the comments can be sacrificed to save space, it would be pretty weird to include student pages without photos. In fact it would be wrong. Just wrong.
Many schools use official school photographs in their yearbooks. We don’t think there is anything wrong with that, in fact it is a really simple way of theming the photographs. But you might want to be a little more creative than this, in which case you are going to need to think of a theme. This could be determined by the theme you have chosen for your yearbooks. If you are doing a movie themed yearbook, then try setting up a red carpet and taking some glamorous pics, if you’re yearbook is music themed then get some microphones and instruments out and have some musically inspired student pages.
If you’re yearbook theme does not provide an obvious style for your photos, then how about some of these suggestions?
- Fancy Dress, we love this idea. Any excuse to get our super hero or movie character costumes out of the wardrobe and we are all over it. Organise a fancy dress day at school (with your teacher’s permission) and take the opportunity to get everyone’s pic’s for the yearbook. You could even use the fancy dress day as a fund-raising event to pay for the yearbooks. This is me dressed as Woody from Toy Story, just in case you couldn’t figure that one out by yourself.
- Signs, signs can look great in a yearbook. This can also provide a fun and different way of featuring comments. Give everyone a piece of A3 paper (or a whiteboard), ask them to write their comment on it, and get a photo taken.
- Black and White, everyone looks better in black and white. No matter how perfect your bone structure, or how flawless your skin, removing colour from a photograph just improves your looks. We have no idea why, we think it is probably magic. But vanity reasoning aside, black and white pictures look great, they provide consistency and can make your yearbook look really classy. If that’s what you’re going for.
We have loads of creative ideas for your student pages, the best way to see them all is to take a look through our blog. If you sign up to it too you will be sure not to miss out on any new ideas we have.
If you don’t want a theme for your photos you can just let people send in their own pic’s There won’t be any sort of theme or consistency, but you’ll be letting everyone ‘express themselves’ in their ‘own personal way’. Which can’t be a bad thing. Can it?
How many students do you want on each page?
2? 3? 4? 6? 8? 12? You get the idea, the possibilities are pretty endless. And there isn’t really a lot we can suggest here. It will of course depend on whether or not you want comments/messages accompanying your photos, and you will be influenced by the number of students in your year, but actually it is completely up to you. Decide what you want to do and go for it.
What do you want the comments to include?
You can either let people write whatever they want, or give them some instructions. If you do give people a free reign on their comments we suggest setting a character limit to make sure people don’t go crazy.
If you do want some consistency with the comments some of the most popular yearbook ideas tend to be:
- Memories
- Quotes
- Inspirational messages
- Goodbye messages
- ‘Describe yourself in three words’
- Song lyrics
Just because these are the most popular comment themes, it doesn’t mean they’re right for you. Be creative and come up with your own guidelines, or subscribe to our ideas blog for some slightly more ‘out there’ yearbook ideas.
