Scrapbook yearbook themes

Erikalinpayne
April 15, 2025

Scrapbooks are deeply personal and emotionally charged. They’re where Millennial moms stash ticket stubs, scribbled notes, and snapshots. Students also lean towards the collage aesthetic via pop culture inspiration—like the Burn Book in “Mean Girls” or My Adventure Book in “Up.”

We love this layout from COACH because it also uses Polaroid-style photo frames and torn paper elements to organize the modules.

While the Burn Book itself is not the kind of sentiment you want to capture in a school yearbook, its visual style has inspired many scrapbook-themed designs: magazine cutout lettering, sticker overload, and chaos-meets-craft aesthetic speak to the way students envision personal memory books. 

Likewise, Carl and Ellie’s book is a love letter to scrapbooking itself. It balances whimsy, sincerity, and nostalgia. (We’re not crying. OK, maybe a little.)

Three Free Treering Themes to Get the Scrapbook Vibe

One of the best parts of the scrapbook yearbook theme is its flexibility. You can up the visual intensity depending on your staff’s skill level and your community’s taste. We have three complete yearbook themes that model scrapbook yearbooks. 

Because a scrapbook style mimics personal journaling, students feel connected. It looks like their notes, their lockers, and, to an extent, their social feeds. The collage-inspired layouts also let you pack in more visual content, perfect for schools that crowdsource images from parents, staff, and students.

“Crafted” - Intro to the DIY Aesthetic

The 75 pre-designed templates have built-in white space and subtle borders, which gives a clean scrapbook look. The 64 graphics, which include a variety of torn papers and tapes, allow teams to add variety and rough edges. This look works well for journalistic high school books that want polish with personality.

Mt. Everett Regional created this senior superlative spread with Treering's Crafted theme. We love how the designer mixed the placement of the superlative on each photo. The layers and shadows make it look photorealistic. Look closely for even more brilliance: the students are on a crumpled paper backdrop.
The divider spread works because the photos are well-cropped with even spacing. Coupled with the spread above, you can see Mt. Everett Regional developed their visual theme consistently.

“Collage” - Scrapbooking to the Max(imalist)

Lean into creative chaos with 862(!) design elements. This theme mimics a real-life scrapbook packed with overlapping images, ripped notebook paper, buttons, stickers, and magazine-style clippings. Because it is a maximalist look, you can create unity among the varied elements by

  • Using the magazine letter for headlines and a clean font for body copy and captions
  • Keeping photos to rectangles
The team at Westlake Elementary layered in actual artifacts with event photos. They made their collage spread personal: the map in the background is of their town, and the checklist was distributed at the event.
This award-winning spread celebrates Seabury Hall's performing arts. It caught our eye because the story develops on multiple layers. Every look reveals something new.

“Venture” - the Vintage Journal

Inspired by antique books, this yearbook theme includes 100 aged paper backgrounds plus 616 graphics including typewriter keys, delicate handwritten fonts, antique elements, and photo corners. The textures and photorealistic elements work well in layers with a handwritten or type-writer font. Like the maximalist approach above, remember the rules of design to keep it from looking cluttered.

This field trip spread from Classical Conversations - Petersburg tucks in papers as the backgrounds for headlines and captions.
The "Venture" theme also works for custom pages. Using the papers allows for autographs, and the included frames hug students' best moments.

A scrapbook yearbook theme works at any level, elementary, middle, or high school. It can look rustic and handmade. Retro and analog. Colorful and chaotic. Minimalist and soft. The best part? It doesn’t lock you into a single aesthetic—it's more of a concept than a rulebook.

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