Anonymous asked: random questions! 1) what's your position on staff? 2) are you graduating this year? 3) how does yearbook distribution work at your school? my school distributes in august so we can cover graduation and prom in our book and stuff. i know some schools even have a fall book and spring book. 4) what's the relationship between the yb staff and the newspaper? at my school, we have our separate ways, but help the other out when we're in need.

Happy Memorial Day! I love random questions! 

1. I am the sole Editor-in-Chief of my staff for the 2012 school year. 

2. I am graduating this year, but I hope to work on the yearbook staff in college. 

3. We actually have two days for distribution. The first is a “by invitation only” sort of deal where 50 randomly selected people will be able to pick up their books June 1 during their lunch period. We’re providing snacks and drinks. 

The second happens next Monday- everyone is able to pick up their books all day long. We sell Sharpies and hang out in our staff shirts. It’s basically an in-school field trip for everyone on staff.

Prom, graduation and senior superlatives are covered in a summer “Senior Supplement.” It’s a short, eight page book and we only print 900 copies of it for seniors to pick up in August. 

4. Our newspaper and yearbook staffs definitely act like a mildly dysfunctional family. We share a room and help the newspaper way more than they help us as far as design and headlines go. Yearbook has also taken over the room decoration wise. We’re usually in there more than newspaper because we’re on constant deadline while they have a specific “crunch week.” In this last month’s newspaper issue, they named us the #1 “Most Influential” group in our school, so that was a really nice homage to everything that we attempt to do.  

catzzidybitch asked: What do you guys do when your book comes out and people complain about things? Is there anything you say to them?

The only thing you can really do is apologize. Tell them that you are very sorry that their name is spelled wrong or you misused the proper to and forgot a period at the end of a sentence, but there is nothing you can do about it. Simple as that. You don’t have to defend your book, yell at them, or get huffy. 

When people point out a mistake, you can’t take it personally. Chances are that person thinks they are super smart because they found a typo in a 300 page book a bunch of tired, over-achieving, AP class taking students made. I mean, hello- you’re in high school. It’s not humanly possible to be a professional editor at 16 years old. 

Sometimes I know it can be difficult to respond nicely. You put the past year of your life into this book and people really don’t know that. I swear, students at my school think the book is finished in October and we don’t do anything for the rest of the year. So, just keep calm, apologize, tell them to join the staff so they can keep that from happening next year and when you get home, put this meme on their Facebook wall.

Anonymous asked: what are some good random spread ideas?

Non-traditional spreads- MY FAVORITE! So, I don’t know if you are talking about topics or design ideas, so I’ll give a little mix of both. 

Topics:

-Fashion, bucket list, fans, maps (school, world, nation etc), lingo, post secret, future plans, a thank you page, people profiles, thematically related things, student artwork, procrastination, dares, cafeteria, parking lot, anything relating to your school specifically, the ideas are endless

Designs:

-Anything that differs from your traditional book design

-Full bleed photo (that’s just one giant photo with all of the content in the photo), create a wordle-esque thing, typography is very popular right now, use one page as a full bleed photo and then the other to be more content driven

-The best place to look for designs is in magazines. If you like something, rip it out, take a photo of it and adjust it to be better suited for a yearbook spread- easy peasy! 

Anonymous asked: Are you on the Editor List?

Nope. I am not.