Stephen Williams on Designing Yearbook Covers

Few people have spent more time thinking about yearbook covers than Stephen Williams. As one of our Cover Contest judges and a designer of more than 6,000 covers, he brings a unique perspective to the process. Here, he shares practical tips, common mistakes to avoid, and plenty of encouragement for yearbook teams creating their own cover designs.

Designing Yearbook Covers
~ by Stephen Williams, The Cover Artist

START WITH A BOOK IN YOUR HAND

Before you start scrolling or sketching, grab a previous yearbook, open it, and lay it flat, cover-side-up in front of you. That rectangle is the actual shape you’ll be designing. Notice that the front cover is on the right, the spine is in the middle, and the back cover is on the left. If you only design the front cover, you’re less than halfway done.

Now, close the book and hold it in your hands. Look at the three panels individually. This is your end user’s experience with the book forevermore. For the next 70 years, they will hold it closely but shelve it more.

I want you to start here for another reason: a sense of scale. We often browse yearbook covers on our phones. The bigger the cover graphics are, the more eye-catching they are on our tiny screens, and the more engagement those images receive. Now look at the book in your hand. Set your phone on top of it. You can fit about six smartphones on one yearbook front cover.

We’re inclined to make our theme graphics big and in the center of the cover because that’s the “norm” we see online. But that’s selection bias. Algorithms favor those designs because people engage with them at 3” wide. You’re free to make your graphics any size you want, but don’t let your phone screen trick you into designing something that is shockingly larger than you expected once the full-sized books are in your hands.

This all reads like a visualization exercise but actually try it. Handle a book for a few minutes, maybe hold your phone beside it and scroll yearbook covers, and be mindful of your experience.

SIZE AND SHAPE

STOP! Before you open Adobe Express, before you scan student artwork, before you buy the perfect image from Etsy: know what size you need!

For every cover, there is a specific size and resolution that your artwork needs to be. Anything smaller won’t print clearly, and anything horizontal won’t fit on your (usually) vertical yearbook cover. Ask your Friesens Print Consultant or Project Specialist for a template, or for the actual dimensions and minimum resolution required to print correctly.

I’ve broken dozens of young, artistic hearts by telling students that the illustration they worked on for weeks was done on a canvas the size of an index card, and unfortunately “enlarge and enhance” isn’t real.

FRONT COVER: THE KEY THREE

Three things are constantly recommended to appear on the front cover: the theme, the year, and the publication name, if your book has one. When a book doesn’t have a publication name, I’ll sometimes put the school name on the front cover as well, even though it’s also on the spine.

The common mistake is to make all those three elements roughly the same size. When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.

So, here’s the framework I use in every session, using a metaphor borrowed from award-winning yearbook adviser turned guru, Marilyn Scoggins:

1. Papa Bear = Theme: It’s the one thing that should be completely unique, different from last year’s book. That’s usually our hero.
2. Mama Bear = Year: That’s different from previous publications, but predictably so. We all know how numbers work.
3. Baby Bear = Publication Name: That’s on the cover every single year, volume after volume, and it doesn’t change, so it doesn’t need a lot of attention.

The way I say it out loud to a yearbook team:

This big, cool theme, for this year and this year only, has been brought to you by this publication/school.

The size difference should look intentional. If your visual hierarchy isn’t obvious, it hurts your design.

BACK COVER: TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT

It’s pretty common in a cover design to hear someone say, “Well, we have to put SOMETHING back there.”

You don’t. You really don’t.

Hopefully, you’ve used the closing pages of the yearbook to bring your book to a satisfying conclusion. There’s no requirement to put anything on the back cover. Very few schools consistently put their address on the back cover, and that information should be included on your title page (Page 1).

Generally, the back cover is more structural than aesthetic. However, if your front cover naturally wraps around to the back cover, that’s great!

Just avoid these common tropes:

1. “The End.” Nobody finishes the last page of the book and looks to the back cover for closure.
2. “The backside of (whatever’s on the front cover).” Your mascot is on the front cover and on the back cover you want to feature THAT?
3. Anything that doesn’t match the front cover. Sometimes schools can’t decide between two themes, and if they don’t outright combine them, they’ll add the “other” theme to the back cover.

TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR SPINE

The spine is the panel that everyone just…types, yet it’s the part that works silently and diligently while the book sits on a shelf, generation after generation.

My own high school yearbook spines have been staring at me from my bookshelf since 1993, but I haven’t opened the books since 1994. So, I always design book spines with that in mind.

Use the same fonts and colors you’re using on the cover, unless legibility becomes an issue. Try not to institute hard-and-fast rules for WHERE things go on your spine year after year, because having some flexibility will allow you to make the spine fit the design, especially if the front cover design wraps around to the back cover.

Here’s what typically goes on your spine: the full name of the school, without abbreviations. Some competitions would like you to also include the city/town and province/state. The spine should also repeat the year and the publication name even though they were on the front cover, and you’d include the volume number (if your school tracks one) in Arabic numerals.

People are still out here acting like everyone can decipher Roman numerals that aren’t featured on a clock.

BIG RED FLAG

If you don’t already have a volume number, resist the urge to invent one by counting years since the school opened, because that might not be accurate.

For example, some schools skipped a volume during COVID. Older schools skipped volumes during wartime. Schools have merged. The school opened in 1967, but in August, so 1968 was really the yearbook volume that was published, assuming a yearbook was even published that first year.

Only trust what you can see or verify. Do a deep dive, make sure you know if a year was skipped, and count them by hand if you have to. Anything less than due diligence is a “best guess” and that might not be historically factual.

It’s better to have no volume number than a wrong volume number.

WHERE DO WE PUT OUR MASCOT?

There are three reasons to put the school’s mascot on the cover:

1. It reinforces the theme.
2. It sells books.
3. You need something on the cover to represent “the student body”.

If your theme directly relates to or names the mascot, it’s often a good case of “see and say”. If you’re in a school where the cover has to have the mascot and school colors or book sales plummet, the Rah! Rah! Sis-Boom-Bah! Let’s make that tiger as big as possible!

It’s usually with designs that mimic magazines or comic books, but sometimes the design calls for an image that would normally feature a person. Since it’s risky to put photos of people on the cover (more on that very soon), it’s often more fitting to use the mascot to represent the reader.

Beyond those three examples, everyone who bought the book knows they were Tigers in high school. They bought the book for the things they won’t so easily remember.

WHY CAN’T WE PUT PHOTOS OF STUDENTS ON THE COVER?

You absolutely can! Here’s my advice:

1. Any time some students are featured on the cover, someone not featured on the cover will have their feelings hurt. You may or may not hear about it, but who wants to be responsible for putting that energy out into the world?
2. Representation matters. Aim for the most diverse mix of students possible. All races, all genders, all grades. Again, it may never come up, but if it does, upset parents don’t make angry phone calls to the cover artist or student photographer. They call the yearbook adviser or principal. Neither is fun.
3. Your cover is often printed well before your final page deadline. If one of your students does something heinous between printing and distribution, you either have an expensive reprinting problem or a sensitive public relations problem. Never underestimate the bad judgement high school seniors are capable of as their graduation date approaches, no matter how upstanding they’ve been for the past 11.75 school years.

Please sign the waiver below indicating you understand the risks involved with printing photos of students on covers, and initial next to the line, “Nobody to whom this actually happened thought it could possibly happen to them.”

CAN WE HAVE A STUDENT DRAW OUR COVER? OR HAVE A COVER DESIGN CONTEST?

There are pros and cons to having students draw (or win!) the cover design.

As a product, a student-drawn yearbook cover can energize the student body, which bumps up sales. And there’s probably no more relatable, finger-on-the-pulse-of-the-student-body cover art than a drawing from a student…right now.

As a historical document, those drawings seldom age well. Everyone who buys your book will outgrow that cover design.

In a best-case scenario, with all our good intentions and encouragement of having their artwork printed for the masses, the chosen illustrator will be inspired to pursue visual arts. And very soon they will look upon their high school yearbook illustration and want to set it on fire and start again. [1]

[1] Source: I was that kid.

As a student, I hand-drew several of my school’s t-shirts, flags, and even some internal yearbook graphics. All of them are incredibly cringe-worthy now.

However, there are exceptions.

BRAINSTORM A BIT BETTER

When you go to Pinterest and search for “high school yearbook cover”, you’ll get the same image results that every other yearbook team sees. And you’ll very likely see Morgan.

Years ago, a portrait photographer pinned a photo of a senior named Morgan holding her yearbook. To Morgan, it was a meaningful senior photo. To the photographer, it was representative of their work. It was not at all meant to influence the yearbook design world.

But the Pinterest algorithm pushed it far and wide, and I spent the next three years finding new and (exciting) ways to design “jOURney”.

For many people, the first place they look for ideas is Pinterest. They all type in the same search terms, and they all get the same first page of results (some of it is my work, I’m not complaining!).

And this is how the internet has homogenized the brainstorm experience.

I’m not even going to ask you to stay away from Pinterest, though it’s currently being overrun with AI slop. All I ask is that you broaden your search terms.

Here are three search terms that will find sources of information beyond yearbook covers. It’s also a good exercise for students in taking inspiration from something that isn’t the exact same product they’re making, rather than simply replicating a yearbook cover design they saw from another school.

Package Design

Poster Design

Coffee Table Books

HANDS DOWN THE BEST SOURCE OF INSPIRATION, AND IT DOESN’T EVEN REQUIRE AN INTERNET CONNECTION

Your guidance counselor’s office is packed with dozens of college recruitment brochures. These, even more than yearbooks themselves, are stellar examples of visual and verbal theme carried through not just a booklet, but multiple pieces of media.

Like yearbooks, they need to appeal to high school students. Unlike yearbooks, college recruitment brochures aren’t designed by students. They need to look slick enough to convince teens that this is the place to spend their tuition money.

College recruitment brochures are designed by professional design firms whose job it is to be original and ahead of the trends. They use the freshest fonts, and they curate color schemes that mesh well with the school’s colors. If you don’t have any on campus, there’s a good chance your junior class is getting them mailed to their houses every week.

Get your hands on as many as you can and add more every year.

USE GENUINE INTELLIGENCE

Regardless of your views on using Artificial Intelligence to aid the brainstorming process, let’s acknowledge all of the ways you are better than robots:

• You know your community.
• You know what makes your school unique.
• You know what will make the upcoming/current year unique from other years.
• You know how your yearbook will fit with (or stand out from) every other yearbook the school has in its archives.
• You know your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
• You know that when the team is excited about something, they make it faster and they make it better.

In a perfect world, every yearbook cover would be completely proprietary to the school. Something that wouldn’t make sense if any other school were to copy it. This is a high bar to clear, and it happens very rarely, but maybe that’s because people aren’t looking for ways to make it happen.

Aim for something that is truly yours.

If that’s not in the cards this year, check your designs against the following three criteria:

1. Make it unexpected, whether that means different from your last book, different from most books, or surprising in one specific way.
2. Make it concise. Say just enough to make sure somebody wants to open it and reward them with how well you expanded on that design through the rest of your book.
3. Make it appreciated, because at the end of the day, you’re making a product that people buy, and a happy student body is better for your yearbook budget.