The idea of designing a yearbook can be pretty intimidating if you lack artistic skills. The great news is that anyone can design a yearbook, and even if you aren’t artistic or creative, there are programs out there that can help you design the best yearbook possible. If you’re in charge of building your high school yearbook and aren’t sure where to start, read on for information about templates and the kind of design help that will come in handy when turning your creation into art.
Getting Design Help
Even if you’re not artistic, fear not! You can get all the help you’ll need for your yearbook design online. In fact, many students like you have been designing fabulous school yearbooks from places like Mixbook for years. Mixbook’s online software can help to create scrapbook, yearbook, and other memory book pages in minutes and is easy to use.
Using Mixbook or another program like it means you’ll have access to customer service and can have questions answered as you design. Using their templates, the text and images you import will come out looking like you hired a professional artistic designer for your creation, taking the worries of your own artistic ability or lack of out of the process entirely.
If you decide to use Mixbook or another professional program, you can still be assured your work will come off as original as templates can be altered to suit your needs.
Finding Inspiration
One way to build an artsy yearbook is to take the time to gather creative ideas from social media and places like Pinterest in advance of designing those first pages. This is a great way to decide what color schemes you like and more. For example, if you’re seeing inspirational quotes you enjoy and think represent your graduating class, you could even develop a theme around favorite quotations. As you work toward your final design plan, never underestimate the power of inspiration you can take from other sources. All of your research ahead will lead to a better final product.
When looking for inspiration, don’t forget to look for blogs and vlogs on print design. Even if designers aren’t specifically talking about yearbooks, you may learn a lot in watching a designer use an easy program like Canva for personal touches that you could incorporate into your project.
Relying on Theme
Using a unique theme is a no-fail way to come up with a final product that feels both cohesive and artistic. Instead of stressing about your lack of artistic ability, spend your time taking surveys of classmates to find out what types of themes might best represent your school. You might be surprised how many ideas they come up with and may even get some offers of help, too.
Once you’ve found a theme you’re happy with, return to those software templates to let the program do the artistic work for you. Perhaps you’re going for a vintage look and want a black and white center spread. Doing a search in the program for words like “retro” “old-fashioned” or “vintage” will result in the perfect template for those pages and may even inspire the rest of the design for your full yearbook.
At the end of the day, you’ll love how your yearbook comes out if you take the time to make use of the resources on the internet. From the best yearbook design software to programs that can suggest a good yearbook layout, you might be surprised at just how easy it is to design a book you’re proud of without any real artistic abilities of your own. Best of luck to you and the yearbook staff in creating a yearbook spread you can all be proud of. You’ve got this!