Yearbook Advisor

Being a yearbook advisor is high stakes. You have to manage a team of adolescents to design and publish a professional work that pleases 700 students, over 100 faculty and staff, and thousands of family members. You are capturing memories and documenting them so they can live on forever.

I had zero publishing experience. I dabbled in Procreate for fun. I was not a graphic designer… yet.

But I knew artistic balance. I knew my audience. I knew how to communicate and get people excited.

So for the 2019-2020 school year (yes, the Covid year), I was the Lubbock-Cooper Middle School Yearbook Advisor.

To add to the challenge, the previous yearbook… was. a. DUD.

I promise I am not just being rude or having a difference in artistic opinion. The cover was stock gray. It had a photo of the front of the school on the front cover and the back of the school on the back cover. There were multiple mistakes within the yearbook as well— the wrong names in photo captions, typos, the same few students on every page.

Students and parents were less than pleased, and far too many vowed not to buy a yearbook the following year— my year.

Yikes.

User Interviews

So I created a strategy centered on customer experience.

We conducted user interviews with students that did not plan to buy a yearbook based on last year’s design. Our goal was to uncover what they were looking for in a yearbook and how we could gain their trust.

We knew they wanted more from the design than they got last year. We learned they wanted color and personality. They wanted memorable. And they wanted a yearbook that was actually a reflection of the school, not just the yearbook staff and their friends.

So we had our goals mapped out:

1. Bold design

2. Accurate and representative

3. Earn trust

Focus Groups

I started in Procreate and sketched out 5 design ideas. We wanted to keep the design a secret for a dramatic reveal, so I used my class as a focus group to pitch those designs. We followed that with a blind vote. I then brought the top choices to my stakeholders to let them weigh in. Once we finalized the concept, I created two different cover options and a visual branding guide for my team.

Building Trust

I taught my team photography with a DSLR camera, photo editing, layout design, publishing software, project management, and marketing. I created pricing structures, managed the tiny budget (low sales from the previous year left us with little to work with), designed background spreads, and planned sales events. They were putting in the work and building the skills necessary for success. So it was time to work on building trust.

We needed to give the school a little taste of what we were working on to build more buzz and sales. We decided to place promotional ads to showcase the students’ photography skills and practice messaging. Based on the interviews, we knew students wanted to know the yearbook would be representative. They also used the word “memorable’ multiple times, so we chose to focus messaging on memories.