Evaluate Last Year's Book

Prior to starting on any publication, you should always look to take stock of your current standing. To do so, you should look at last year’s publication and dissect every piece of it; assessing items you enjoyed, disliked, and would like to change. Items that should be discussed can range from the following:

• Cover – design as well as cover embellishments
• End Sheets
• Book organization
• Page Ladder
• Books shape, size, and number of pages
• Dividers
• General Theme
• Folio Design + Placement
• Page Layouts
• Photography
• General organization elements of the class/team

Once you have completed the analysis of last year’s book, you are officially ready to dive into next year’s book!

Download The Assessment Form

Set The Expectations

The next step in getting your new yearbook started is setting the expectations for this year’s yearbook. Set goals for both your publication in general, the production process and your staff. Expectations will help set the tone for the yearbook class, provide general guidelines, and set goals to achieve for the entire staff.

Ideally, you should be looking to set expectations such as:

• General goals for this year’s book (ex: sell more books, include secondary coverage on each page, etc.)
• Goals for the production process (ex: meet every deadline, reduce the number of missed events, etc.)
• Goals for staff growth (ex: teaching/learning a new photography skill, everyone getting a certain mark, etc.)
• Other book and team goals