InDesigner: Jostens Yearbook Design Contest

Printed yearbooks? Aren’t those dying in this hyper-digital age?

Not at all, says Rich Stoebe, director of communications for Jostens. “Signing the yearbook is a traditional teen ritual. Instant messages get deleted, but a yearbook lives on. In today’s digital environment, it may be the only permanent record you have of your friends.”

And that’s why the Yearbook Design Contest, jointly sponsored by Jostens and Adobe, is still going strong in its fifth year. About 700 yearbook spreads were submitted for the 2009 contest, all of which were created in InDesign. Out of that field, the judges selected 25 middle school and high school students.

When it comes to judging criteria, “readability is a guiding principle above all else,” says Gary Lundgren, senior marketing education manager at Jostens. “That doesn’t mean it should look like your grandmother’s yearbook, but younger designers tend to over-design. If the viewer can’t read it, it fails to communicate.”

Yearbook designers have a unique challenge: “Schools want to get a lot on every page to represent teens,” notes Lundgren, “and that challenges the student designers to squeeze in more text and photos than a pro magazine usually would.” Consequently, contest judges often award designs that allow for a lot of content displayed in a creative way.

While Jostens prints high-school yearbooks, the submitting schools don’t have to be Jostens customers. The educators also don’t have to stretch their already-tight budgets: Anyone can enter the contest for free.

Over the contest’s five-year history, Jostens has seen certain yearbook design trends emerge, many of which mirror the larger world. “The number of digital images they have to work with has grown a lot in five years. And not only are they putting more photos on pages, but they can manipulate the digital images more easily,” says Lundgren.

“Two decades ago they had glue and scissors and printed photos. Now they have the same tools as the professionals, so we see things like students extracting parts of a photo from the background.”

“Design trends are clearly impacted by technology,” says Stoebe. “More schools produce their yearbooks in color versus grayscale than ever before. There is also more content available. More people have cameras, and there are community upload sites so that all members of the community can upload pictures—it doesn’t have to be just yearbook staff. That makes the book more inclusive and authentic”.

Lundgren concludes, “Yearbook design has changed more in the last five years than in the last 50. And the overall professionalism keeps getting better. Tools aside, the quality of design and photographs are really improving. Teens nowadays live in a visually sophisticated world, and that shows in what they create.”