Subscribe to our blog
Most recent
23 yearbook hacks for 2023
Forget resolutions, it's time to get to work. Our staff brainstormed the top yearbook hacks you can use at any stage in the yearbook creation process and packed this blog with videos, how-tos, and examples. Use the quick links below if you need to jump to a specific area.
Yearbook Design Hacks
Designing a yearbook is much more than just putting pictures on pages. Intentionality, storytelling, and branding are included. The following time- and sanity-savers will help you progress in your role as editor, adviser, coordinator, or yearbook fan girl.
1. Auto Layout
What if you could just drag the photos you want to use on a spread and they would magically be organized and re-sized? Voilà!
The best part? Everything is still fully editable, so if you need a starting point, you can continue to build your spreads with more photos and text, swap our images, and change the color of the elements.
2. Color Picker
You can pull the exact color from any picture to add to your design. This builds the yearbook’s visual cohesiveness because you can pull from photos or graphics to create your custom palette.
3. Layers in Design
Up your design by using layers to arrange photos, images, and text. In the examples below, you'll see graphic elements used as photo frames (movie night spread) and editable shapes used to organize content (table of contents). Using the forward and background tools in the options panel can help you arrange elements.
4. Custom Pages
Schools are used to offering senior ads as a way to congratulate students. Treering schools take it a step further and allow every family to tell their story with two free custom pages (and the option to add even more).
5. Missing Portrait Hack
"Picture day is the easiest day of the year," said no adviser ever. As hard as we work to make it a flawless experience and to capture every student and staff member, perfect attendance is out of our control. One way we love to see people included in their respective sections is by flowing them in with this spirited touch.
6. Advanced Portrait Settings
Another hack for your people section is included with the advanced portrait settings. Subtitles are a simple way to add marks of distinction such as student activities and honors as well as staff department or job titles. Other advanced portrait settings include spacing and sizing options.
7. The Magical Shift Key
Shift your process for aligning and rotating objects.
8. Printed Proof
A printed proof is an exact copy of your yearbook, and every school gets one free. Use your printed proof to
- Check the placement of cover art
- Assess the readability of fonts, especially the names on your portrait pages
- Show off your amazing work (more on this in the marketing section)
9. Picking Favorites—it's OK!
"Liking" graphics, backgrounds, and photos makes it easier to find them to add to yearbook spreads. To use your hand-picked collection in your book, filter by "My Likes" and "Team Likes" in the drop-down.
10. Pre-Designed Pages
Annually, Treering publishes elementary and middle/high school "Year in Review" and "Best of the Year" Pre-Designed yearbook spreads. These spreads include noteworthy highlights from pop culture and current events, and like all things Treering, these pages are editable so you can choose to replace the content with your own. Some communities prefer school or local election news, campus trends, or athletic records. Pre-Designed pages which include mention of our philanthropic partner, Sandy Hook Promise, are also available as well as about me, art gallery, and puzzle pages.
Get More People in the Yearbook
The best practice for yearbook coverage is to ensure each student is in the yearbook three times. Think one photo in each section: portrait, classroom, and activity.
11. Crowdsourcing Features
Treering’s crowdsourcing tools include integrations with Facebook, Instagram, and Google Drive as well as shared photo folders. Teachers, parents, and students can email photographs from their devices directly to event folders in your school account.
According to adviser Lauren Casteen, Yearbook Hero and leader of Treering’s Teaching Yearbook cohort, there are four reasons to crowdsource content:
- Equity: if you want your book to look like your school, your school needs to help you build your book.
- People are already familiar with documenting and sharing their lives via social media—it’s an easy next step.
- Your yearbook staff can’t be everywhere all the time.
- Less work for you! (This is our favorite.)
12. Monitoring Coverage
A big question we hear is, "Why would you want to tag student names when we're not doing an index?" Since our job as advisers is to cover all the students on campus, tagging is one way to track how many times students appear in the yearbook. It also helps you find out who is missing from your pages and craft strategies to include them.
13. Keyword Tagging
By using keywords such as event names and topics (e.g. AP Lit), your search just became that much more powerful, and the English folder less intimidating to navigate.
14. Find Carmen San Diego
Tagging by student name helps you easily find students within your web of folders.
15. Polls
Create polls to give a snapshot of the student body's preferences. Treering's software even makes the graphs for you. Expand on this or that-style questions or multiple choice ones by interviewing a respondent for more detail. You may be surprised why your star soccer player is a cat dad.
Marketing Tips
The second semester is when we see surges in book sales. Here are some hacks to get more yearbooks in more hands.
16. Free Yearbook Flyers
The price is right. So is the message.
17. Use Your Printed Proof as Social Proof
Social proof is one way you can positively encourage others to support your program by buying a yearbook.
- Show students, teachers, and parents how you are using the photos they submit by posting a PDF proof with their snaps in use
- Share sneak peeks
- Photograph your printed proof around campus as if it were a student (tag us!)
- Video your yearbook team swooning over their work
Hacks for Yearbook Advisers
All of the above definitely apply to yearbook advisers and coordinators, and here are few extras because you are our people.
18. Free Webinars: Yearbook Club
A yearbook adviser PLC? Live yearbook training? Technology pro-grow? However you want to sell it to your admin, we have it. And it’s free.
19. Styles
By establishing photo and text styles early on, you create a cohesive look for your yearbook. Because the font library continues to grow, it's nice to set some limits, especially with emerging designers!
20. Portrait Proofing with PDFs
Printing PDF proofs from the editor dashboard as soon as you get your portraits flowed is one quick way to ensure accuracy. Distribute them to the office staff and classroom or homeroom teachers for a double and triple check.
21. A List of Evergreen Content
Evergreen content for yearbooks is a collection of interview questions, infographic topics, and story ideas that can be used throughout the year. While we want to have a yearbook that reflects the current year and trends, having a timeless collection keeps your students working on interviews and photography and provides material to fill in on portrait pages, sports sections, and even in the index.
22. Supplemental Books
Sometimes club sports, special events, and alumni need a little extra. You can still attach a fundraiser, take advantage of our free design software, and enjoy all the other perks of making a Treering book: no minimums and a three-week turnaround from the day you submit.
Treering’s printed books for family reunions, church or neighborhood directories, scout troops, sport associations (rodeo, mountain bike, cheerleading, gymnastics), 4-H, school auctions, cookbooks, performing arts studios, first responders, and more.
23. Yearbook Hack Central: Treering Blog
(Shameless, we know!) We're glad you're here and hope you find more yearbook hacks by searching the blog or signing up for notifications when we post new content.
Happy holidays from treering yearbooks
Since 2009, you’ve trusted us to capture and print your priceless memories, and we reflect on this honor every holiday season. In addition to helping schools raise nearly $2 million in the 2022 school year, we printed over 600,000 custom pages in 2022—that’s a lot of joy. Thank you for trusting us with this invaluable task. We wish you all the best this holiday season and we can’t wait to get to work in 2023. Happy holidays!
What to Expect in 2023
- Semi-monthly training through Yearbook Club
- Design contests for editors and parents
- Your memories arriving within three weeks of clicking Print Ready
- New predesigned "About Me," "Year in Review," and "Best of..." pages
- Superior support as you design, market, and distribute your best book yet
- Weekly blog articles to provide inspiration and resources - subscribe and have them sent to your email
Staff pictured
Top: Chrissy K. (Customer Success Manager), Jason S. (Customer Success Manager), Jen C. (Customer Success Manager), Niri B. (Customer Success Manager), Brian M. (Director of Engineering) with Titan
Bottom: Melizza T. (Community Advocate Team Supervisor), Codey V. (Community Advocate Team - Quality Assurance), Daneesha B. (Community Advocate Team), Ramona E. (Community Advocate Team), Robelyn O. (Community Advocate Team)
What is a yearbook theme package?
When I say yearbook, you say theme. Yearbook! Theme! While that's not the actual rallying cry of yerds everywhere, it's pretty close. Yearbook themes dominate our club meetings and search history. Graphics, layouts, and backgrounds comprise the visual aspects of a yearbook theme package. Idiom dictionaries and pun generators comprise the verbal.
The Value of a Theme Package
If you're not ready to create your own style guide from scratch, a theme package will help save you time and simplify the design process by
- Taking the guesswork out of creating a color scheme
- Organizing graphics and text in collections
- Modeling quality design
- Unifying your book with a consistent look
Fully editable layouts complete each yearbook theme package, like the portrait spread below. In addition, your chosen yearbook theme could also become the foundation for the yearbook marketing campaign. Create social posts or share PDF proofs in displays around campus.
Three Ways to Choose a Yearbook Theme Package
The main purpose of a yearbook theme is to capture the uniqueness of the school year while setting the tone for the story the yearbook will tell.
Without a unifying theme, our yearbook contains only arbitrary events and students. Theme functions as the understated but essential ingredient to make this year’s story meaningful.
Theme 101: Visual and Verbal Elements
When it comes to yearbook themes, many of us stop at the visual. When you have a great theme package, it's easy to do. Combining both visual and verbal theme elements take your design to the proverbial next level.
Visual
This is the easy part: making it pretty. When you have a codified collection of graphics plus a color palette, you can use your visual elements to do more than make your book pretty. Check out the example above: graphic elements are used to draw attention to the pull quotes. Stylized numbers (really an editable shape under a text box) match the photo to the caption.
Verbal
The vocabulary you use in your yearbook further communicates your yearbook theme. These verbal elements can be punny headlines or idiom derivates from your theme. While you don't want to overdo it (think the Coco Chanel rule), take time to add a lexicon to your theme brainstorm.
Here's what it looks like: the yearbook theme is Stay Gold. Students look up idioms for gold and compile lists of how they can be used. For example:
- Golden Age of the Bulldogs (opening)
- Heart of Gold (staff section)
- Gold Feet (soccer)
Whether you’re a Treering user or not, we hope your students' stories are told beautifully and authentically from cover to cover.
Portrait perfection for your yearbook
Yearbook portraits comprise up to 40% of your book. Pause and contemplate that for a sec: row after row of awkward head tilts and half smiles with the same speckled background your mom had in the 70s fill the bulk of your pages. If you want to change up your layout and use the space to add additional content and cover even more students, we have a blog for that. This one, however, will help you nail the core of your people section.
Work with Your Photographer
Treering’s portrait autoflow works with any photographer.
Tweet
If you’re not the picture day coordinator (lucky!), meet your school photographer and find out when you can expect to get access to your portraits. The two-to-three weeks between makeup day and when proofs arrive should be a part of your workflow. Spend that time prepping:
- An accurate roster
- Fall event yearbook spreads
- Poll, survey, and academics content you will incorporate in your portrait section
Extra credit: learn the how, what, and why of portrait files in the Treering Help Center.
Portrait Pages: Faster Than a Cup of Coffee?
Treering’s engineers know we have a diverse group of users, so they included automation—such as portrait autoflow—in the arsenal and DIY features. Absent and new students can be flowed in after the fact, and your portrait pages will automatically re-alphabetize. What a relief!
PDF Proofs for Portrait Pages
Editors tell us the secret to an accurate portrait section is utilizing the free PDF proofs in your editor dashboard. Some of the ways schools check names are
- Distribute proofs to classroom teachers to ensure all their class is pictured
- Post PDF proofs in the lunch room so students can sign off on their names and grades
- Work with school administration to comb through portrait proofs and match them to the school’s database
- Share PDFs proofs at a PTA/PTG/PTO meeting for parents to check (this is also a hot marketing tip)
The more eyes that you have checking the spelling of names and making sure that the photo and name match up correctly the better.
Yearbook hero Katie Thomas mastered the late start
Treering Yearbook Heroes is a monthly feature focusing on yearbook tips and tricks.
As a parent volunteer and part-time teacher at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic School in Elk Grove, CA, Katie Thomas took over the pre-K through 8th grade yearbook, inheriting boxes of unsold books from previous years. Her first mission: to not waste people's money or the school's.
What challenges did you face as a new yearbook adviser?
Looking for a yearbook publisher that would allow us more time to complete the book so we could include spring events was a priority from the start. I also didn't want the stress of having sales quotas. Since I made the preschool pages with our previous publisher's software, I can appreciate how easy it is to create with Treering's software. That and the three-week turnaround really sold me.
At the time, I taught three-year-olds and I would transition to leading middle schoolers in the yearbook club. We started with the Treering yearbook ladder to decide what would go in the book and planned from there. It's still a work in progress on how we finalize page assignments, and for the most part, 8th-grade students create their section, and the 6th- and 7th-grade students do sports, activities, and class pages.
You sold 65 books in one week. How did you achieve that?
Really, I'm not one for pushing sales. I tapped into these existing channels to reach parents. Our school communicates through student council announcements and email blasts. When we neared our final deadline, I ensured parents knew it was the last chance to buy it for school-wide distribution, and if they waited, they'd have to pay shipping and handling. I had a handful of them. Seventy-six percent of the school community purchased books.
Also, joining Yearbook Club webinars helped. I've learned classroom management tips such as having a job board for students between projects and how to organize photos in shared folders.
What are you doing differently this year?
We started sales early and leveraged the 10% discount. We are also involving the school in choosing the look of the book: the yearbook club narrowed the themes down to five and the entire school will vote. The school’s annual motto is “Embrace Joy” and we will tie that in with the book to make it uniquely 2022-2023.
Last year, I grabbed laptops and phones to AirDrop photos to myself to upload because grades couldn't mix due to COVID protocols. I did a lot of texting to parents. This year, we are using the built-in crowdsourcing features: the students are creating their own flyers with QR codes to shared folders. The flyers say things like, “You could be featured like these photos in this year’s yearbook. Send us your back-to-school photos.”
The other big thing is I will order my printed proof sooner and try to get everything finished earlier.
QR Code is a registered trademark of DENSO WAVE INCORPORATED
Crowdsource content for a more equitable yearbook
We see it all the time on our feeds: pics or it didn't happen. The same applies to your yearbook. According to adviser Lauren Casteen, Yearbook Hero and leader of Treering's Teaching Yearbook cohort, there are four reasons to crowdsource content:
- Equity: if you want your book to look like your school, your school needs to help you build your book.
- People are already familiar with documenting and sharing their lives via social media—it’s an easy next step.
- Your yearbook staff can’t be everywhere all the time.
- Less work for you!
What Should You Crowdsource?
The short answer is anything: photographs, survey/poll responses, and stories. Here are some of our favorites:
- Pet photos
- Senior plans
- Student art
- Photos from away games and tournaments
- Classroom photos
- Field trip snaps
- Evergreen content
- Hoco/Prom-posals
Casteen puts it this way: "Everyone matters and has a story to tell. Storytelling is a way to incorporate different voices." Crowdsourcing for these stories is a start. Follow up with submissions with interviews to understand the process, history, or cause/effect of the photo.
If a Tree Falls in the Woods...
And no one shares a pic, no one will know you're crowdsourcing. Something like that.
To start and maintain a solid crowdsourcing effort, create a plan for a series of time-specific asks. For example, if you need band photos from the regional competition, reach out to the director and boosters before the event to prep them. Then follow up the next day. Think about your own camera roll: how long does it take your weekend to be swallowed up with the screenshots and snaps you take Monday through Friday?
Assess your Communication Channels
What tools does your school have in place to communicate with staff and students? RenWeb may not be the cutest, but if that's how your parents receive messages from the school, stay the course. Active social media accounts are also great ways to meet specific users, especially if the robotics team has its own Facebook group or the PTG uses theirs to solicit members.
Check out this article if you need to see some more winning social posts to help you crowdsource and sell more yearbooks.
How Treering Helps
Treering's crowdsourcing tools include integrations with Facebook, Instagram, and Google Drive as well as shared photo folders. Teachers, parents, and students can email photographs from their devices directly to the yearbook folders.
Elementary theme ideas from pinterest
When it comes time to prep a recipe, outfit, dinner party, or even yearbook, Pinterest is the go-to place to receive inspiration. (We get it, this blog is a close second.) Yearbook theme ideas on Pinterest provide inspiration for elementary yearbook coordinators, middle school clubbers, and high school editors alike, but how many can you drop into your book right away? Spoiler: Treering has over 300.
From Idea Pin to Yearbook Pages
Groovy, one of our new elementary yearbook themes for 2022-2023 is one of our top saved posts on Pinterest. To apply this, or any other pin-worthy theme, log in to your Treering account and click "edit yearbook" on the dashboard. From there,
- Set your styles and theme
- Select a layout or create your own
- Import and add your own photos to pages
- Access shared photos from your school community
- Add your own text or use one of the overlays to pages
- Add theme graphics to pages
- Add or change the page background
- Autoflow your portrait pages
With 15 fully editable layouts for club, classroom, and event coverage, filling pages with memories is as simple as dragging and dropping. Coordinate portrait pages, specialty coverage, and recognition ads with 40 included backgrounds and 150 graphic elements.
This left-facing page was created using Groovy's built-in theme graphics. Using the lowercase letters from the collection, this idea came to life with a few clicks of the align tool. We love interactive pages because they are one more way students can make their yearbooks their own. Also, these are especially fun over which to reminisce in the years to come. On the right side of the spread, there is room for a photo collage of classroom celebrations or even teachers' favorite dishes.
And if you're on the hunt for high school inspiration, tech seems to trend.
Elementary theme ideas from pinterest
When it comes time to prep a recipe, outfit, dinner party, or even yearbook, Pinterest is the go-to place to receive inspiration. (We get it, this blog is a close second.) Yearbook theme ideas on Pinterest provide inspiration for elementary yearbook coordinators, middle school clubbers, and high school editors alike, but how many can you drop into your book right away? Spoiler: Treering has over 300.
From Idea Pin to Yearbook Pages
Groovy, one of our new elementary yearbook themes for 2022-2023 is one of our top saved posts on Pinterest. To apply this, or any other pin-worthy theme, log in to your Treering account and click "edit yearbook" on the dashboard. From there,
- Set your styles and theme
- Select a layout or create your own
- Import and add your own photos to pages
- Access shared photos from your school community
- Add your own text or use one of the overlays to pages
- Add theme graphics to pages
- Add or change the page background
- Autoflow your portrait pages
With 15 fully editable layouts for club, classroom, and event coverage, filling pages with memories is as simple as dragging and dropping. Coordinate portrait pages, specialty coverage, and recognition ads with 40 included backgrounds and 150 graphic elements.
This left-facing page was created using Groovy's built-in theme graphics. Using the lowercase letters from the collection, this idea came to life with a few clicks of the align tool. We love interactive pages because they are one more way students can make their yearbooks their own. Also, these are especially fun over which to reminisce in the years to come. On the right side of the spread, there is room for a photo collage of classroom celebrations or even teachers' favorite dishes.
And if you're on the hunt for high school inspiration, tech seems to trend.
How to make a yearbook with Treering
Making a yearbook with Treering's online software is as simple as drag and drop. Options such as portrait autoflow and auto layout make anyone look like a professional designer, and integrated professional tools, including a color picker and page designer, give you the flexibility to create from scratch.
Watch a brief software demo.
What Editors Love
Teachers, parents, and students enjoy using Treering's free online creation software to collaborate on their yearbooks. They also enjoy
- Flexible deadlines
- Three-week turnaround
- Custom pages
- No order minimums
- Ease of use
Why Principals Choose Treering
School administrators and the front office team appreciate
- No contracts
- Inclusive pricing: 100lb. paper, software, curriculum, bulk shipping to school, themes
- E-commerce tools that collect payment and show real-time order reports
- Fundraiser capabilities
- Parents can order after the deadline (no one ever misses out!)
Yearbook hero Nick Pasto engineers success
Treering Yearbook Heroes is a monthly feature focusing on yearbook tips and tricks.
Meet the man who created Treering's new color picker. Engineer Nick Pasto grew up among cherry, walnut, and apple growers in Stockton, CA. In addition to his swoon-worthy homemade lasagna (yes, Pasto makes pasta) inspired by his time studying cuisine with Italian grandmas, Nick led the teams which developed many of Treering's other editor favorites:
- Recognition ads
- Spell check
- Marking pages "done"
- Polls
- Language support for Arabic, Chinese, and Hebrew characters
- Alignment tools
- Package tracking improvements
(This is not an exhaustive list by any means.)
How did you move from the classroom to the backroom?
Back then, Treering’s design software was Flash-based, and that was going out. I saw a message that they were looking for developers to change it to HTML5. The opportunity spoke to me because there was a lot of overlap between my professional career and personal interests.
While earning my art education degree, I worked as a graphic designer and animator for my college. I’ve also been an indie game developer.
[Editor's note: Nick made Super Chibi Knight with his eight-year-old daughter who served as the voice actor for the main character; she's now 18.]
How does your background as a classroom teacher make you a better developer?
So many people who work at Treering are currently making yearbooks at their kids’ schools. I’m one of the only engineers who’s served as an adviser. It helps to have real-world experience with our product because I can see it from both sides.
The leadership at Treering looks for a breadth of experience to remain customer-focused and make the best product. The strength of our team is our diversity–our experiences help with ingenuity and problem-solving.
We build in a ton of automation and templates to make things less intimidating. You don’t have to know Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign to do desktop publishing for your yearbook design. Treering’s software is the bridge.
If you could tell our editors anything, what would it be?
The most impressive part of Treering as a user is the customer service.
Like many first-time advisers, I missed our deadline. The pressure of making sure kids had their books before summer was stressful. As a new teacher, it was too much on my plate.
I picked up the phone and just communicated with the CAT team and they helped me work it out by using my fundraiser to pay for expedited shipping. My students received their books on time, and I determined this is a company I am interested in learning more about. It was then I knew I wanted to work here.
Why I stopped publishing senior quotes
Unpopular opinion: senior quotes are problematic because they are unoriginal and full of risk. Before you click away from this perceived pessimistic view, put on your journalist hat and look at the facts. This position is not an anti-expression rant but a push to develop original, authentic content for our yearbooks. Here’s how I replaced senior quotes 15 years ago.
Three Reasons To Start a New Senior Tradition
1. Participation and Originality
A struggle we see from advisers is a small percentage of students submit their senior quote. Those who do use a quote from a movie, song lyric, or timestamp, not their own thoughts. That’s not journalism. These pop culture references may have a place in a module or personality profile elsewhere in the book if it relates to your theme.
2. Vetting Process
Do you know the periodic table? Are you fluent in slang, TikTok trends, drug euphemisms, and veiled sexual references? Does your district have a hard line on what is free vs. hate speech?
3. Senior Quotes Can Equate to Bad PR
A quick news search for "yearbook senior quotes" yields myriad results of senior quotes gone wrong. Allegations of bullying in the yearbook and “unlawful accessing” the online editor abound. Schools have even cut the pages from their books due to the quotes in print.
Ideas to Replace Senior Quotes
Thanks for sticking with me. Below are ways to celebrate the seniors on your campus and capture their voices (rather than Michael Scott’s).
Brag Sheets
If your seniors want to leave their proverbial mark, include their school contribution with their senior portrait. A Google Form listing all the activities, clubs, and teams offered on your campus makes it quick for students to click through. Partner with a department and ask for it to be the bell ringer or exit ticket for a day.
You could also include class stats, such as athletic participation rate, percentage of students in leadership, and volunteer hours.
Include More Quotes With Expanded Captions Throughout the Book
If your yearbook program is journalistic, it should have storytelling and reporting at its heart. Expanded captions include direct quotes. By using them, you are creating a yearbook full of original voices and senior, junior, eighth grader, etc. quotes. Here’s how it works:
- Identification information: who is doing what when and for what purpose? (Use present tense.)
- Secondary information: what is something you wouldn’t know from looking at the photo? (Use past tense.) This could be the result of the play or experiment pictured or the relationship between the students.
- Quote and attribution: include a direct quote from the subject that adds emotion, opinion, or information that isn’t obvious. Identify the quote with last name (grade) said.
Create a Survey Based on Thematic Coverage
Theme is king in yearbook. You selected it because it was the guiding story and look for your book. When you are developing your theme, create interview questions using this language.
For example, Rock Academy’s theme “Give + Take” yielded interview questions such as “What’s your take?” or “Give me five…” (songs, class activities, places you go on campus, etc.). Pro tip: use an idiom dictionary to search for such spin-offs for your theme.
For their book “Speak Life,” Sequoia High had a running module throughout the book called “Speak Your Piece” with quotes from students about a specific moment.
Sell Ad Space
Yup. I said that. When you pay to play, there is a little more consideration and propriety. Some schools offer 1/8 page to all their seniors and give parents the option to pay for upgraded space. (You'll have to get creative with the alphabetizing.) Others create a section with the index to feature ads.
With Treering Yearbooks, families also have two free customizable pages that print only in their book.
Stay the Course
Full disclosure: my first year, there was a little heat from students and a petition. By year two, students (of all grades) saw their voices in every corner of the yearbook, and no one questioned it. The standard response became "We have senior quotes on every spread in the yearbook."
Why I stopped publishing senior quotes
Unpopular opinion: senior quotes are problematic because they are unoriginal and full of risk. Before you click away from this perceived pessimistic view, put on your journalist hat and look at the facts. This position is not an anti-expression rant but a push to develop original, authentic content for our yearbooks. Here’s how I replaced senior quotes 15 years ago.
Three Reasons To Start a New Senior Tradition
1. Participation and Originality
A struggle we see from advisers is a small percentage of students submit their senior quote. Those who do use a quote from a movie, song lyric, or timestamp, not their own thoughts. That’s not journalism. These pop culture references may have a place in a module or personality profile elsewhere in the book if it relates to your theme.
2. Vetting Process
Do you know the periodic table? Are you fluent in slang, TikTok trends, drug euphemisms, and veiled sexual references? Does your district have a hard line on what is free vs. hate speech?
3. Senior Quotes Can Equate to Bad PR
A quick news search for "yearbook senior quotes" yields myriad results of senior quotes gone wrong. Allegations of bullying in the yearbook and “unlawful accessing” the online editor abound. Schools have even cut the pages from their books due to the quotes in print.
Ideas to Replace Senior Quotes
Thanks for sticking with me. Below are ways to celebrate the seniors on your campus and capture their voices (rather than Michael Scott’s).
Brag Sheets
If your seniors want to leave their proverbial mark, include their school contribution with their senior portrait. A Google Form listing all the activities, clubs, and teams offered on your campus makes it quick for students to click through. Partner with a department and ask for it to be the bell ringer or exit ticket for a day.
You could also include class stats, such as athletic participation rate, percentage of students in leadership, and volunteer hours.
Include More Quotes With Expanded Captions Throughout the Book
If your yearbook program is journalistic, it should have storytelling and reporting at its heart. Expanded captions include direct quotes. By using them, you are creating a yearbook full of original voices and senior, junior, eighth grader, etc. quotes. Here’s how it works:
- Identification information: who is doing what when and for what purpose? (Use present tense.)
- Secondary information: what is something you wouldn’t know from looking at the photo? (Use past tense.) This could be the result of the play or experiment pictured or the relationship between the students.
- Quote and attribution: include a direct quote from the subject that adds emotion, opinion, or information that isn’t obvious. Identify the quote with last name (grade) said.
Create a Survey Based on Thematic Coverage
Theme is king in yearbook. You selected it because it was the guiding story and look for your book. When you are developing your theme, create interview questions using this language.
For example, Rock Academy’s theme “Give + Take” yielded interview questions such as “What’s your take?” or “Give me five…” (songs, class activities, places you go on campus, etc.). Pro tip: use an idiom dictionary to search for such spin-offs for your theme.
For their book “Speak Life,” Sequoia High had a running module throughout the book called “Speak Your Piece” with quotes from students about a specific moment.
Sell Ad Space
Yup. I said that. When you pay to play, there is a little more consideration and propriety. Some schools offer 1/8 page to all their seniors and give parents the option to pay for upgraded space. (You'll have to get creative with the alphabetizing.) Others create a section with the index to feature ads.
With Treering Yearbooks, families also have two free customizable pages that print only in their book.
Stay the Course
Full disclosure: my first year, there was a little heat from students and a petition. By year two, students (of all grades) saw their voices in every corner of the yearbook, and no one questioned it. The standard response became "We have senior quotes on every spread in the yearbook."