Your Guide to Better Yearbooks and Essential Yearbook Design Resources
Resources That Inspire, Support, and Elevate Your School’s Story
Explore expert tips, creative ideas, and practical tools designed to help yearbook advisors and students build meaningful, unforgettable yearbooks—one page at a time. These yearbook design resources support every step of your creative process.
Ready to start your yearbook journey?
Let’s Make Your Yearbook Design
Unforgettable
From design ideas to finishing touches, we make creating your school yearbook simple, collaborative, and fun. Explore our most common questions below to learn about school yearbook printing options, custom features, and add-ons that make your yearbook truly one-of-a-kind.
Add glossy full colour printing, turning the jacket into a poster.
Gilding
Add gilding to the page edges, or print text or graphics along the book block.
Printing on Vellum Skin
Print in color or foil on your vellum skin. You can also add multiple vellum skin tip-ins to your book.
Customize a book case to hold one or multiple yearbooks. The case can be sealed or built with an opening on any side.
Add foil to your endsheets or pages; a variety of colors are available.
Add 2, 4 or 6-page gatefolds anywhere in your book.
Personalized metal name plates, with icons if desired. A debossed panel on your front cover allows the plate to sit flush on your book.
Tipped-in Images
Add tipped-in images into the front or back of your cover
Soft Covers
Change to soft cover, or adjust the thickness of your hard cover .
Add a customized laser die-cut of text or a graphic on the front or back of your cover.
Choose from one of our hundreds of leatherettes, linens and textured materials. We have an incredibly wide range of textures and colors to choose from. This material can be on your entire cover, or we can use quarter-binding to blend multiple options together.
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Personalize your covers, front and back. Each cover can be unique, or we can tip in one or a few unique images into each cover.
Emboss further with a customized 3D embossed cover with gold, bronze or silver silkscreen paint for a metal-like finish. Using polypropylene, a polymer resin, we work with a softer texture in a strong setting that allows for incredible depth and detail.
Emboss (raise up) some artwork on your lithograph cover, or deboss (press in) some artwork on your lithograph cover.
It’s never too early! The sooner we can hear about your goals and needs, the sooner we can provide support and guidance – even if you’re still wrapping up the current years’ book with your
previous publisher.
Our turnaround time is based on the volume of your order and your location, with delivery in as few as 3 weeks with express service. As we offer free page resubmissions and a complete, cover bound ProofBook for your review, we recommend submitting files 5-10 weeks ahead of your desired delivery date, in order to ensure your book is exactly what you want your students to receive. Ideally, we’ll connect with you long before submission time to provide training and support
to your team as needed.
FutureBook schools most commonly design their yearbook with Adobe InDesign, the graphic industry standard for design and layout. Along with InDesign, students are likely to use tools such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom and Bridge to take their yearbooks to the next level. Not only do the FutureBook representatives train and assist with Adobe products throughout the year, your class will be provided with a complete curriculum based on the InDesign model, including student workbooks and templates.
If an online solution is what you and your team are after, FutureBook will set you up with a license with one of our two yearbook creation providers. Choose from YearbookFusion by LumaPix, or Pixami’s YearbookPro. We will help you determine the best fit for your team, and will provide you with training and support along the wa
Yes! We will set up a custom order site where you set the pricing and parameters, and we’ll provide you with weekly reporting.
FutureBook yearbooks are printed in a world-class facility employing the highest of professional printing standards.
The FutureBook yearbook comes standard in full color, with a customized full color 150pt cover. Your endsheets are also full color and can be different files, front and back. Your design and images will pop with color and detail, as we print with a 200-line CMYK press. FutureBook’s premium printing standard guarantees every picture in your yearbook is printed at the highest possible quality.
Your layouts are printed on 107# Forrest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified premium gloss paper stock. Finally, your book will be sure to stand up to the years of review it will go through, as it is Smyth sewn, case bound and square backed. We added in standard features such as the full color dust jacket, 8 blank matte autograph pages, a color ribbon and headbands, and a vellum tip-in.
While features such as laser die-cuts, lenticular 3D cover images, foil printing and embossing will really make your design come to life, we’ve heard from countless schools that our FutureBook standard model alone outshines what has previously been published at their school.
Furthermore, every FutureBook yearbook is inspected by hand before being boxed to ensure there are no defects. And with our ProofBook, you get to see and feel the final product for yourself before it hits the production press!
Yes! Our professional design team can create your yearbook for you. Our StudioBook allows for complete in-house creation, based on your content. It can be as hands- on or off as you wish, and we’ll provide you with a final proof to review before submitting. You will always have the final say before we print.
You’ve made it. You’re at the end of your school career. Let’s separate this year from the rest. Keep your Senior yearbook in pristine condition with the FutureBook GradBox. In truth, every student at your school can have the GradBox if they so choose – in that case, it may simply be known as a book box to all of the undergrads!
By providing the GradBox only to the Seniors who receive their yearbook, you’ll be giving them one final gift for all of their efforts undertaken at school. The GradBox, just like your yearbook cover, can be designed as you see fit, in a variety of textures and materials. We suggest adding in photo corners to keep a copy of either your diploma or your Senior photo tucked inside. Your nameplate on the front will make this box personalized just for you. A beautiful keepsake to ensure your most important yearbook stays safe with you.
The MovieBook is a traditional (at least to FutureBook’s standards) yearbook with a screen and soundboard BUILT RIGHT INTO YOUR YEARBOOK. That’s right, your yearbook has all the texture and pages you rely on, but it also has a video component included. Our exclusive MovieBook comes standard with 1 GB of storage on a micro SD card, three unique channels, stereo sound, a lithium rechargeable battery with cable and even a headphone port. Each channel can be up to 15 minutes in length, with the content created at the school.
What might you do with this technology?
For starters, you know all the social media videos and images you share; content that never makes it into the yearbook? Where might it go in ten, five or even two years? We have no control on whether the platforms (and our precious memories) will be accessible. Move your viral (and not so viral) videos and images to one channel in the MovieBook. Another channel can be dedicated to Senior prom and other events related to the graduating class. Maybe your team makes it to State, or even beyond? Celebrate their accomplishments with their own channel. Perhaps you deliver your yearbook in the spring, and so miss out on a few key events, these can be summarized in a channel. Does your yearbook deliver in the fall, with limited opportunity to share around for autographs and final notes? Leave one channel available for self-reflection and well-wishes from friends and staff.
Ultimately, like your yearbook, the FutureBook MovieBook is yours to design as you see fit. It can be as creative and detailed as you like, with full sound and motion, or you can create photo slideshows with images that didn’t make into the yearbooks. If you leave a channel empty, the students can upload whatever content they deem most important. Take your yearbook to the next level by including the MovieBook in either the front cover, the back cover or the GradBox. A great feature is that you can choose how many yearbooks include the MovieBook – it does not have to be your entire order, but only a minimum of 25!
By partnering with companies like Canon, Tinkerine 3D Printers and SMART Technologies, FutureBook’s Awards Program has delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cameras, 3D printers, SMARTboards and peripheral equipment to our yearbook customers.
The Awards Program entitles customers to a technology allowance, allowing you to purchase your preferred brand of equipment for the production of your yearbook. The purpose of FutureBook’s Awards program is to upgrade your yearbook production tools and teaching technology every year – so you can create the best possible yearbook every year. Just ask us what you’re looking to upgrade!
Are you an existing customer, looking to produce a smaller book for a specific group in or around your school? Or perhaps you would like to switch publishers to work with FutureBook, yet run orders between 150 and 300 copies. FutureBook’s short-run printing option does allow for smaller schools and organizations to gain many of the benefits of FutureBook’s standard offering.
Our standard short-run quality features 80# gloss paper stock, 120 pt cover boards, square-backed binding, head and tail bands, full color printing, and a variety of enhancement options to provide the students with an exquisite package of memories at the end of the year. As your order is smaller, you will benefit from a quicker turnaround, while still maintaining an affordable price-point. We will provide you with the same level of support, either in person or remotely, depending on your location.
Protecting and enriching the environment – this is a job for everyone. Together with you, we are working to leave our planet better than we found it.
At FutureBook, our focus is to deliver exceptional yearbooks via ethically and environmentally optimal channels. An obvious concern in publishing is the amount of paper usage in the industry. We are taking an active approach to mitigate the loss of trees and biodiversity for this cause. To begin with, our standard yearbook offering comes printed on Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Certified Paper stock. In order to be FSC compliant, the materials must be harvested and manufactured in a sustainable manner, meeting the highest environmental and social standards. As well, our chosen paper stock is chlorine-free.
FutureBook’s laminations (for glossy covers and spot UV coatings, for example) and adhesives are water-based, and all FutureBook ink is vegetable-based. Some publishers still print with oil-based inks and dyes.
We use recycled cover board materials, plastics and cardboard shipping boxes. Our manufacturing facility follows a strict in-house recycling program, minimizing waste wherever possible.
We take our partnerships seriously, and want to make sure that our good intentions materialize into real action. And so, on your behalf, we plant one tree for every yearbook sold. Our trees are planted in partnership with Trees for the Future and create sustainable sources of crop shade, soil rehabilitation, food, windbreaks, medicine, erosion control, sustainable timber and more for these communities.
Yes! We’d love to talk with you about other publications you’d like to bring to life, from children’s books, cook books, novels, text books and more. Please visit our sister site at futurebookprinting.com to learn more.
FutureBook’s head office is located in Victoria, BC. Most of our partners who work behind the scenes to bring your project to life are based in North America. The printing of our yearbooks is in Shenzhen, China. As you may know, China prints the highest percentage of books, in any genre.
We partnered with our facility in 2007 after years of rigorous research and testing with printers throughout North America and around the world. Our demands were- and continue to be- for high quality printing, integrity pricing, ethical business practices, positive employee standards, and high environmental standards. A few key points about our plant:
- They print for customers world wide, and have won numerous awards and accolades in printing, particularly in the children’s book industry.
- They follow strict human resource codes and pay above average wages for both the location and industry.
- They operate clean and satisfactory equipment.
- Their pre-press is located in Ontario and is managed by family of the owners, meaning that our communication is dealt with locally and with highly skilled and trained operators.
- We personally travel to the plant multiple times a year to monitor production and to strengthen our relationship.
Partnering with this plant for numerous years has provided us with a price advantage and quality we haven’t seen in a lot of our competitors, and we’re pleased to be able to pass this along to customers such as yourself.
Your Next Chapter Begins With FutureBook
Ready to Start Your Yearbook Journey?
Let’s bring your school’s memories to life with a custom yearbook designed just for you, supported by helpful yearbook design resources and creative tools.