Adding a spot of gold is a growing yearbook trend. And we love it! While gold is a go-to accent for a 50th-anniversary book, use it to capture the spirit of 2024. See how easy it is to build a gold-themed yearbook with these design ideas and headlines.
Free Whole-Book Looks and Yearbook Templates
You don’t have to begin with a blank book. Opting for a theme package is a time-saving alternative if crafting one from scratch seems overwhelming. These four golden packages by Treering Yearbooks below streamline the design process and are fully editable.
Gold Foil Yearbooks
Adding optional gold foil to the cover draws attention to specific elements like the school name or key theme graphics.
These two resources will help you begin:
Advice as Good as Gold
“A [Treering] theme does a lot of the graphic design work for you: it’s like giving your students fill-in-the-blank notes as opposed to having them copy them by hand,” said Yearbook Hero Lauren Casteen.
She and her team select one or two of Treering’s graphics packages and adapt them to tell the story of the year. They design layouts from scratch using the backgrounds, overlays, and other included visuals to build their style guide. Read more on Casteen’s approach to teaching design alongside using Treering here.
More Than Just a Look
A visual theme becomes stronger when headlines connect content to create a story. Your gilded yearbook theme is more than a color scheme; it’s a clever play on the year (‘24) or a way to highlight a milestone (e.g., 50th anniversary). Here are some headlines to align your verbal and visual theme.
Headline Ideas
A gold yearbook theme needs some golden headlines. We love browsing an idiom dictionary to create a list of headlines and spinoffs. Pro tip: an idiom dictionary is a great place to start with any theme.
- Worth its Weight in Gold
- Gold Mine of Information
- Heart of Gold
- Gold Standard
- Silence is Golden
- Golden Girls
- Gold Star(s)
Punny Gold Headlines
Puns, while a particular favorite of this adviser, are best used when peppered in. Using too many becomes like white noise and runs the risk of being unfunny. (The horror!) Remember, if one person doesn’t get it, chances are, many of your readers won’t–case in point: the Ponyboy Curtis reference above.
- Au-some
- Glitter of Speech
- Gold Feet – soccer or step team
- Golden Age of the [mascot]
- Goal Diggers – volleyball
- If I Gold You That
- Thanks a Bullion
Headlines Using Synonyms
As with puns, too many Gold This and Gold That headlines diminish the luster. Brainstorm a list of synonyms to use, and then search your idiom dictionary for new nuggets.
- All that Glitters
- Rain or Shine
- Rise and Shine
- Sea to Shining Sea
- Shine On
- Shining Example
- Take a Shine to
Writing Your Own Headlines
If a curated list is too much of an easy button, and you want to teach the process, here are five steps to craft a headline.
- Review the spread and sum up the coverage in a single sentence.
- List five keywords from the coverage.
- Look up idioms and/or puns incorporating those keywords and their synomyns. Compile a list of five to ten before moving on.
- Evaluate which headline idea achieves the goal of accuracy, clarity, and interest.
- Revise and rewrite until the answer is “yes” for all three.
To dig more into a goldmine of theme development, check out
