Design
I created the templates used by our staff to design spreads in the 2025 yearbook. This year, I’m showing staff members how to design their spreads from scratch, which is more difficult but more rewarding. Below are some examples of spreads I designed. Click an image to view its PDF version.
Nikean Yearbook 2025
This is the opening spread for the 2025 yearbook. The theme was “It’s All About … The Little Things,” and we used bright colors, hand-drawn elements, and a playful design.
This spread shows little moments from throughout the year, and also includes an epigraph of sorts as well as short quotes from students.
This is a divider. The book was organized chronologically by season; this is the winter divider. It features a table of contents, some winter-related photos, an article, and a handwriting mod.
The handwriting thing appears throughout the book, on dividers and portrait pages. We asked students to handwrite short answers to questions. The one here is “What is your favorite thing about winter?” We then scanned and cleaned up each answer and laid them in. This took the better part of my winter break!
The copy on this spread is about a surprising number of false fire alarms, each requiring the fire department to arrive. The dominant photo was one I took on black and white film, but since it was the only photo we had of a fire truck, we used it and added the hand-drawn, colored lines to add a pop of color to fit our theme.
This is an example of one of the regular spreads in the book. I created 8 templates at the beginning of the year that fit our theme. They all contain 7-10 photos, a story, and room for modules. This spread has a quote mod and a statistic mod.
The folio on every regular spread begins “It’s All About…” to fit our theme, and there’s an interview question that fits the topic of the spread, with five quotes each.
This book has a playful style while staying clean and organized. With templates, each spread feels cohesive in the book.
Nikean Yearbook 2026
This opening spread introduces the 2026 yearbook’s theme. We wanted this spread to establish the book’s modern design approach and full color palette.
Choosing photos for this design was a challenge; these are abnormally panoramic crops, and not many photos are possible to do this with. I also had to get creative with fitting captions. Furthermore, using text as masks for images isn’t possible in our yearbook publisher’s online design software, so I had to create this in Photoshop to then import.
Summer recap spreads are typically a challenge, mainly because it’s hard to source good photographs of students’ summer adventures.
This drone shot I took of a large community event in Bloomington, which returned for the first time last summer since the COVID pandemic, felt like it fit perfectly as a spread background, helping to make the spread feel full without as much content as a typical spread.
Above are two examples of what our standard weekly spreads look like. These spreads showcase elements of our theme, such as elements of newspaper design, boxes, and a professional, modern-looking layout. The design challenge we face most often in this book is fitting many differing topics on a single spread. As a result, spacing elements is a careful process: too close and they feel like they should be about the same thing, too far and we introduce significant white space, which can often be trapped.
I work with the students assigned to each spread to plan the layout. It usually starts with a list of what they plan to cover, and then we grab a folded sheet of paper to start charting out the sections of the spread. Then we transfer the paper layout to the design software, and the photos and copy can be inserted.