The Dreaded Blank Page

Starting a book from scratch is unusually stressful.  You have all sorts of ideas and all the pages in the world to get started, yet you find yourself frozen!  This is actually a fairly normal bodily response, written out very well by the Mississippi Writers Guild!  While this isn't exclusively about yearbooks, it does go over some key activities and hints to keep your brain refreshed and to keep that pencil (or keyboard) moving.  

With that being said The first Mistake people make is:

10)  Starting Late!

People really don't tell you how much work goes into a yearbook, and nothing stifles creativity more than a tight deadline.  We always recommend you start the yearbook as early as possible, even if it's just jotting down where pages will be on your Ladder page.  That extra push to make notes about how you plan out the book will be a game-changer for when you're actually ready to pick templates and start working on the pages.

You are also never starting from scratch!  If you have a yearbook from previous years, or if you still have your yearbook, you can use this to plan out a similar layout to your current project.  Planning is key!

9) Editors Vs Staff

When adding users to work on the book with you, it's important to give them the correct privileges in order to get the ball rolling!  

A fairly common issue we see is that sometimes, advisors will give everybody a login for the website and make them a STAFF user.  It makes sense, though, that a staff person can be interpreted as someone working on the book, but what we really want is to make sure that they are EDITORS!

Editors can access the designer, upload and use photos, and basically do all of the necessary work for your book, whereas STAFF users can only upload photos, which is useful if you have an assigned photographer.

Additionally, you can change these permissions as an admin by going to Manage < Manage Permissions to give staff more access or editors less access.

8) Not Filling in Bleeds

7) Content in the gutter

6) Mixing Text and Noisy Backgrounds

Its fun to let your wild side out and try out some cool fonts mixed with backgrounds, but there is such a thing as “Visual noise”.

In the picture on the right, you can see that some text is fairly obvious, but some of the details begin blending with the text in the middle of the picture, causing words to be misread/illegible.  Its important to keep contrast between text and background at a readable level to make sure all of your students and staff are in their prime!

5) Open Your Boxes!

The day is here!  You got your box of yearbooks 2 weeks ago, and you're ready to hand them out to your kiddos.

But half of the books had shipping damage…

This is a catastrophic realization that could have been prevented/solved if we had opened the books when we received them.  We went over how printing is seldom perfect earlier, and the same holds true for shipping.  We use various carriers to deliver your books (FedEx, USPS, Etc), so it's important to understand that when boxes are received, it should be a priority to go through them to make sure nothing is damaged or misprinted before it's too late.  We are always happy to assist you should something come in damaged, but we also need time to prepare for emergencies!

4) Utilizing Your Peers for Pictures

Half of the job of yearbooks is getting high-quality pictures to use!  Thankfully, we have a method that doesn't require you to be in 3 places at once, especially when events are happening at the school. 

With Email Photos, your life as an advisor just got so much easier.  For every category you make on Manage Photos, a subsequent email will be created if you click the “Email photos” tab!

You can create as many event categories as you want, and hand out as many emails as you'd like in a big announcement, and youll see tons of photos pour in for you to use at your disposal.

3) Deleting People From Your Data

We have a very comprehensive guide on how to upload and flow your people data, but it doesn't cover everything about how to use it.

A common mistake we see is attempting to remove people from existing pages in order to delete that person entirely.  Not only will this not work, but it could potentially mess up your people page template, so now we're two steps back instead of one.

In order to remove people from your data, you will want to leave your designer, and head into Manage People Data.  From there, you can select individual people and hit “Delete Selected” to remove them from your data entirely.  The cool part about this is that if you modify people's data on a page that was already flown, the page will automatically update!

2) Overlapping Frames from Right to Left Page

A quirk of EDONext is the method of layering assets on its pages.  You may imagine looking at a two-page spread as working on a “Single” designer, but in actuality, since the all pages render in high resolution as single pages, the right side will always be a separate entity and be “in front” of the left page. 

What does this mean?  Well, it simply means that elements that are rested towards the left page more, will be underneath elements on the right-hand side. So if you are tying to place an image on 2 pages a the same time, make sure the center of the image is nudged towards the right page in order to make sure nothing overlaps that picture.

1) Not Using "Ed" Enough!

Starting a yearbook is hard, especially when you're just figuring out a new software!  Knowing this, we've introduced a new AI tool while you work and learn on the designer.

Meet Ed, our newest AI companion (no, he did not write this)!  Ed is an AI model to help give you the resources to learn anything you want to know about, or give you guides directly from our help pages that go over what you're potentially asking to know about.

You'd be surprised how much you can learn from Ed, and the more you utilize this feature, the faster you'll be at creating and publishing an amazing yearbook.

You can also find Ed on our Help Pages and ask him the same questions while on your quest to seek knowledge!