Here at Diamond Fork Junior High School we have had the opportunity to publish a yearbook at the end of every year since we started out as Spanish Fork Middle School. Not many people know how yearbooks are put together, unless you have been on a yearbook committee before. So I decided to inform you on how these wonderful parts of a school’s history get put together.
First, we all get assigned what pages we’ll be designing. We all choose our top choices in each group, the groups being sports, student life, mugs (school pictures), etc. Then Mrs. Lewis, the yearbook teacher, assigns everyone a page or two from each section. For example I’m in charge of the Volleyball, Track and Field, Halloween Dance, and Character Ed pages.
Next, we have to all agree on the theme, it is not as easy you may think. We usually spend about a week brainstorming and coming up with that year’s theme. You may be wondering why you can’t find out the yearbook’s theme before you get yours. Well, the thing is, when you know what it is before you see it, it takes all the fun out of it. It’s like knowing what you’re getting for Christmas during Thanksgiving.
After that we do the spotlights and surveys. You probably don’t know what those are so let me clue you in. The spotlights are the pictures at the top of the page where a few students answer the same question, not to be confused with the survey which is usually in the middle of a page of student’s pictures and there is one in each grade group. For example last year the question for the spotlight was “Who would you want to save you from a deserted island?” and all of the kids pictures were framed by life preservers. With the survey we hand out little slips with questions to every class and each question is assigned to a grade group and we pick the top ten answers for each question.
Last but not least we work on our pages. Yearbook is only a semester long class so once we are done with all of the other steps the rest of the time we work on our assigned pages. One thing is that our book is due sometime before spring, I’m not sure of the exact date, so all of the things that happen after the book is due are put into the spring supplement. The yearbook staff has to put all of the spring supplements into the book by hand.
We do all of this hard work to make sure that the students of DFJHS have an awesome book that they can show to their future generations. It’s a lot of work but also a lot of fun! I hope this has helped you know a little bit more about how Diamond Fork’s, and other school’s yearbooks gets made.