How to Find Yearbook Layout and Theme Ideas

If you are part of your school’s yearbook staff, you can find it hard to come up with new ideas for themes, colors, modules or generally; your book. In this guide, you will learn where and how to get new ideas to plan ahead for your high school yearbook.

First, you will need the following:

Time
Your Staff
Binders
Magazines
Flyers
Paint Chips
Place to jot down ideas

Magazines are an amazing source of inspiration. They can give you color scheme ideas, font or headline ideas, folio ideas, and layout ideas. So, where to get these magazines? You can ask your staff to each bring in one magazine, and your teacher could even grade you for it. Ok, so now that you have your magazines, what to do with them? Get a big (2 in) binder, and hole punch the magazine pages that you liked. Save anything with colors that could work for your book, headlines that you like, or layouts that could go with your theme. Once they are hole punched, put them in your binder and save them to reference back to. You will be surprised how many ideas you can gather from taking apart just one magazine.

Gathering a bunch of paint chips can be an excellent source of color ideas for your yearbook theme. Go to your local hardware store and sneak out bunches of chips. The ones with multiple variations of colors on one sheet are the best because they can help narrow down color choices. If you already have some colors in mind, make sure to grab a bunch of variations of those colors too. Once you get back (home, class, wherever you’re going), spread them out all over the table, and start picking the maybes and out those aside.

Once you know which ones you like, and which ones you don’t, you can put the no’s aside. With the narrowed-down pile, you can deliberate with your staff and find a unique set of color combinations that will work for your book’s theme. If you save these color sheets, they can be used again and again for future books.

These techniques can easily yield many color and layout ideas for your high school yearbook. Keep any pages or paint chips that you and your staff like in a binder, so that later they can be easily accessible.