Every year when I look at the yearbook, I’m a bit disappointed. The pictures we see in the yearbook are not the ones we want and I always feel like we should be having pictures of us doing stuff, not all posed. It takes away so much of the authenticity and energy we put into our services and extra curriculars. So that’s exactly what I decided to tackle.

I joined yearbook this year and decided to place myself in the designer role for all the events we have done as well as the service pages. I was also given the honour of designing the cover of the yearbook. I used the colour template I was given and created some thumbnail designs. I worked closely with Ms Kuruppu and the other members of the yearbook club to ensure that I was able to use inDesign to its full capacity. It was very hard to start using this new programme at first since it warps a lot if you try to make the image bigger. I discovered that if I could make a placeholder and clicked “fit accordingly to media” it would automatically place it into that frame and fit it without stretching the image. This will ensure that nobody thinks of themselves as fat or skinny because the image has altered their appearance.

The biggest struggle however was gathering all the images for these sections. I had to email all the service leaders and ask Mr Van Zijl for ASA stuff, but they wouldn’t always respond. It did test my patience as I had to wait a while for their response and couldn’t continue without them. I didn’t want to set a deadline at first since I knew most of them still had to get together and take pictures or were hosting sessions with others so I wanted to give them the opportunity to do those things and be able to record them for the yearbook.

I needed to take moments back during this process and think in the shoes of others. I posed the question ‘is this what the students would like’ on multiple occasions. When it came to deciding an overall font I decided to put a poll up on my story so students could select the one they found nice. Every page I started required lots of planning and trial and error to make sure it fit with the rest of the yearbook. I felt the need to give up and call it a day often but persevered and pushed through. It was a challenge that tested my skills and helped me expand on them.

(for now I can’t share any information to do with the template and yearbook in general but I will update it soon 😉)

Featured Image Credit: Yearbook Group