To build a standout yearbook, you spend a lot of time brainstorming ideas and crafting great content. But sometimes, keeping your ideas fresh and unique can feel like a bit of a brain drain. When you use your creative skills all the time, it can be exhausting for your mind. Communication breakdowns, mental blocks, and emotional distractions are all factors that can slow down, or even stop, your creative flow. And since this can happen to all of the individuals on your committee, there’s a lot of variables that can affect the creative process that are totally out of your control.
If you want to work around those creativity barriers with your team, you’re in luck! Today, I’m going to give you three awesome activities that you can use with your team to bust through stagnant work and make your best yearbook ideas even better. Whether you’re working with students, adults, or just yourself, use the tips below and you’ll be amazed at the improved quality of work that will go into your yearbook!
Go Against the Norm
To come up with yearbook ideas that are outside of the box, you have to train your committee to think differently. Start by helping them open their minds to doing traditional things in new ways. Assign each person a task within the yearbook that’s totally outside of their comfort zone. For example, you could have a really great writer learn how to use photoshop, and practice editing the school band photos. Or encourage one of your photographers to draw a few illustrations that would compliment your content and your theme. While their work doesn’t have to wind up on the final pages of your publication, it will give them the opportunity to see the book from a totally different perspective. And that can be just what your team needs to get some serious creativity flowing!
Free Associate
Sometimes you need to get your mind refocused to create original yearbook ideas. Use this activity regularly–it would even be a superb warm-up at the beginning of each class or meeting! To get started, all you need is a dictionary. Open the book up and select a word at random. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with your yearbook theme or content–you just want to engage your team’s creativity. Now ask everyone to start listing off all the things they associate with that particular word. It could be thoughts, activities, phrases, colors, smells, memories–the sky really is the limit! The one thing to remember: no suggestion is a wrong suggestion. And don’t forget to write down some of the great ideas on the board at the front of your room, as this brainstorm could easily spur some unique content for your book. The more you play it, the more you’ll see their creativity start to shine through–and that will definitely carry through to their work on the pages of your book.
Get Outside for Great Yearbook Ideas
Sitting in the same room every time you work on the yearbook can be a little stifling to your committee’s creativity. To spur great yearbook ideas, you need to get your team into a fresh environment every once in a while. When you do this, it’s important to have a mission to keep everyone examining and absorbing their surroundings for new ideas. If you take your committee out to watch a football practice, have them come up with a list of twenty creative words that describe what they see–then work those words into a short poem that they can read to the group the following day, or use as captions within the football spread of your book. If you take them outside, ask them to find three nature-inspired objects that you can use as a team to create a fun nature collage. When you get them thinking creatively outside of the classroom, this can carry over to how they absorb the world on a regular basis. Before you know it, your team will be producing amazing concepts nonstop!
While these types of activities may not directly create the final content that winds up on the pages of your yearbook, they will definitely help your team find a way to refocus their creative energy. And this is exactly what will bring out the kind of inventive yearbook ideas you’ve been looking for!
