Yearbook hero James Costa masters middle school

Treering Yearbook Heroes is a monthly feature focusing on yearbook tips and tricks.

Yearbook Hero James Costa moved from the Boston newsroom to the middle school classroom. Taking his skillset in graphic design and desktop publishing to yearbook production, Costa started as the yearbook adviser in November of 2023. Already months behind, he worked to collect photos, design pages, and create a visual look by himself. (Wait until you see the cover below.)

Now in his second year as a yearbook creator, he has moved from the campus’ Digital Learning Specialist to teaching five preps as a Tech Ed instructor. Combining his ten years of scaffolding instruction plus the experience of creating the book solo, Costa developed a team structure and workflow so students could help. Under Costa’s leadership, the members of Merrimack Middle School’s first-ever yearbook club are learning design, marketing, and the business of yearbooking.

There are no grades when you do a club. How do you keep students on task?

I understand certain students' strengths and try to encourage and empower them for that. They all have specific jobs. For example, I have a student editor who is detail-oriented. After a big photo dump in our Google Drive, she’ll organize all the photos into folders and delete duplicates. She has an assistant editor to help.

There’s also a yearbook club secretary, treasurer, and communications and outreach director. 

Starting in January, Costa and the street team released a monthly yearbook spotlight. They tease the theme, provide ordering info, and hype custom pages.

My superlatives coordinator is in charge of all things superlatives: making the voting form, taking pictures of the winners, and designing the spread. This is the first time we’ve done superlatives.

Some students are more into design and are on the design team creating spreads. We also have a street team that checks out cameras and photographs events.

I instruct them as much as I can in a whole-group setting, and they also need a lot of one-on-one attention. We have about eight consistent kids. 

That sounds incredibly organized. What tasks are currently on your team’s to-do list?

This year is inspired by music. We’re using “Wrapped” and working out how to incorporate elements such as “This or That?” (Olivia Rodrigo vs. Sabrina Carpenter, pop vs. rap). Right now, we're in the stages of just kind of building the ladder and collecting a ton of pictures.

We're just seeing how it evolves and seeing what the layouts give us. I think it's going to be much different from last year's from a design perspective, hopefully, a little cleaner. I had a lot of collages that were kind of just pictures thrown together, but I know the kids like the layouts a little bit more. 

Many of us on staff are in love with the “8-Bit” book you created last year. How did you carry it out?

The funny thing about 8-Bit is that I'll show teachers, and they respond, “It's like Mario,” and the kids see it and say, “It's like Minecraft.” So you see that big division in the generations.

I started with the Treering theme backgrounds as inspiration. On each spread, you see an 8-bit avatar of a teacher. I made those with AI; it was a lot of work word-smithing the prompts to get them to look exactly like the teachers, but that was a lot of fun.

It sounds like fun is a core value of the Merrimack team.

I'm going to give the kids a big shout-out. If I have a tough week, and our yearbook meetings are Friday afternoons, I leave feeling like I had a great day.