T. Relth

In the end:
The 2013 Yearbook is graphically beautiful, well-written, very integrated and looks like one person made it woohooo! and the staffers were very good (great), although sometimes require a bit more pressure from the "ogre" (Mister. R)

New EIC1 Senior Leah Mc. - (she published her own book 2013 now on Amazon)Every single paragraph on every page was either written, rewritten or at least checked by Leah. In the last days, she was still inventing captions.

EIC2 Sabrina F. (a Junior yet with a way amazing work ethic) Sabrina came in every day and extra days to work, work, work, work, well you get the idea.

Graphic Editor, Zineb M. (wow all of the backgrounds with illustrator converted into pdf and dropped in a bkg layer) This scientist of an artist made months-worth of backgrounds and theme ideas...before landing on the final illustrator files and as I say wow.

Senior Amalya B. and the never-ending Senior section - built the 48 page senior section with 470 column inches of story about the class of 2013, plus senior spotlight stories on each and mug-shot plus two portraits and 6 facebook type photos for each... Lotsa work. Collection of anything from Seniors with Senioritis = Herding Cats!

Others who were there: ...drum-roll please:

"The New Kid", Junior from SoCal, Spencer C. - odd sense of humor and great graphic sense, a bit "ADD" etc quote: "I'm not prejudiced, I pretty much hate everyone" -MS and K sections very nice work.

Editor, Rania T. (Junior) sweet as pie and worked very hard.. entire ES section and all transitions. She picked up a lot of slack at the end!! Yahoo. Rania, did YB while juggling several extracurriculars. We thought she might explode ... but she always charged ahead.

Then... there were these two crazy Sophomores: Yasmine B.and Salma B. who were veeerrrryyy creative (almost tttooo much) Yasmine built the whole MS and HS sport section. And Salma made all of the major events "dance" with seriously "pro" level graphics. Did I say dance? I guess that is what they almost did everyday in the lab. (grin)

I miss these guys!

If I missed anything?? .. write to me.

... Oh yeah I spent almost another full year of time on this year's book.... vacations, weekends...but who is complaining?   Ask my wife.

Originally written to a 2009-10 former student at the school:

I can tell you that using Indesign for 5 years (and for 3 years on YB), I am now a "mini-power" indesign user/teacher.

I found out how to automatically merge the 900+ photos by grade, alpha and place correct names below... a major help using excel database. This saved an incredible amount of time ..after it was set-up.
 
Set Limits: 
Also style sheets and limitations on "creativity" were helpful. Otherwise the students tend to wander off in all directions and make a disjointed mess. The other big deal was to use a wire-framing concept in only B/W in Indesign at the beginning to force all of the students to face the limitations of design: space and page layout. 

Wire-framing/black white and greys:
The entire book was laid-out using wire-framing and was formatted with character, type style and paragraph styles along with borders and drop-shadows; all this showed from the beginning. We were able to kill (or revise)the really bad stuff early. Note: Color really gets in the way at first so B/W was the key. With this we were much more likely to see design that did not follow the main thrust of the book.

Layers:
I also insisted on using layers and we started with 4 but later had 6-7 layers in nearly every section. 

File-naming convention-less headaches:
Another help was to use special file names and save "as new" every single time you work ... it also told me when the students worked and I could go back (if needed)....also if a file crashed, we only lost a day. 
For example: 
20130423_77-89_Seniors_Amalya.indd 
(this way files listed in date-order in the file-folder: later we changed to 
77-89_Seniors_Amalya_20130602.indd so that all of the final pages listed in page-order. It was easy to see which files we finalized.

A fast server a MUST:
We were able to get IT to give us a new server ..(the old PC based "M_nr_e" became a slug ...maybe it always was a slug). We received a mac-mini and the art department students and Yearbook team were the only ones on it. The total GB when done ...99.7 GB!! of photos from staff and students and the total other graphics files was 175 GB +/-. It worked like water ...instead of sludge. 

Photos from everywhere - More file naming:
Another help was that I taught the Digital Photo Class with required DSLRs and used Adobe's Bridge Batch naming ... so we had lotsa properly labeled photos from which to draw. example:
20121209_JVSoccer_Sophia_DSC009.jpg


End Notes:
I am thinking of starting a club "International Yearbook Survivors Club" You have to have made more than 3 books to be accepted into membership. The only problem is that by the time you have completed year third year you are so wiped out that you would never let anyone know you did it. One, because someone might want to hire you to do it again and two, someone might ask you to advise.

All in all the best ever if I say so and many others say so too. TR