September 19, 2017
Design Style Guides
One of the most difficult tasks you will be faced with during the year is making sure your team/group/club/students are all on the same page. Not only with the project and the deadlines you have to achieve, but also with the finished design of your Cover, Endsheets, and Pages.
Your editors, designers, and photographers are going to be contributing content to the yearbook and part of your job is to make sure they are all headed in the same direction visually.
So how do you help your students navigate this? You provide some rules in the form of a Yearbook Style Guide.
Your Guide should include:
- fonts, the families, and the sizes,
- heading, subheading and body copy styles,
- colour palette and their CMYK values,
- Layout size, the margins and bleed values
- also create a sheet showing your theme elements.
Print out your guide and make sure everyone has one. Remind your students when designing their pages, to make sure they check the guide so they are doing things correctly. When you are proofing and double checking the pages, have your students add this to their checklist so they are confirming the correct elements have been used and your yearbook is consistent throughout..
It should be your holy grail for how things should look. They say if in doubt throw out, here we say if in doubt check it out..
Having your style guide ironed out early will help everyone move in the right direction without having to double check to make sure they have the latest design decisions. Your group will be able to move forward with speed and confidence.