Nobody said your yearbook index needs to look like a phone book.
If you’re using an index (and, hey, an index is a great way to create a more inclusive yearbook), those final pages of your yearbook can be more than just a place to list where your students appear in the book. They’re the perfect place to add candid photos, package leftover content into mods, and even spotlight your staff.
We hear you even get bonus points if you tie it together with your theme.
If you’re down with sprucing up those final pages, but need some yearbook index ideas, look no further. We dug through Pinterest to find five awesome ways you can add flair to your index pages and end your yearbook on a high note.
Yearbook Index Idea #1: Tie in Your Theme
- Why We Love It: Not only do the textures and font make the pages in the index above more interesting to look at, they can help the book convey a consistent theme cover to cover.
- How You Can Use It: Use colors, shapes, textures, and graphics to bring your theme to life in the index. Think about applying a photo, font treatment, or texture that corresponds with your theme so these pages pop.
- Parting Thought: Incorporating your theme to the very end of your book means your index won’t look like an extra appendage or afterthought.
Yearbook Index Idea #2: Add Mods
- Why We Love It: Adding mods to your index section helps you turn these pages from a sea of names and numbers into something more visually pleasing and substantive.
- How You Can Use It: Take a page from the example above and use the space to run your year-in-review content across parts of several pages, instead of dedicating a full spread to it. Interview students about the events you featured and add their reactions to tie it together.
- Parting Thoughts: Adding mods to the index is a great way to make your index more interesting and incorporate fun tidbits that might have gotten chopped in the editing process. It’s a win-win.
Yearbook Index Idea #3: Color Code It
- Why We Love It: If you look closely at the index above, you’ll notice it’s color-coded by events, activities, clubs, and sports teams. Not only does it add color to an otherwise monochromatic section, but it makes finding a specific group a whole lot easier.
- How You Can Use It: Think through the ways your readers would like to search for stuff in the index, and assign them colors from your style guide. If you find yourself with way too many colors, take a step back and group all your academic coverage together, all your student life coverage together, so on and so forth. That should solve the problem.
- Parting Thought: Your readers are probably most interested in finding themselves, but they’re likely to be interested in finding those activities or clubs they associate with. This process makes it easier on them.
Yearbook Index Idea #4: Showcase Your Staff
- Why We Love It: One of the realities of putting a yearbook together is that you’re often not featured in the yearbook. After all, somebody needs to be taking the pictures, right? And we all know yearbook can take up practically all of your free time. This approach lets your team get the recognition it deserves.
- How You Can Use It: Give your staff some due praise by including their pictures in the index letter headings, like in the example above. Have them interview each other about what they learned, what they accomplished, and how all of that made them feel. Include quotes to give all your readers a sense of how hard your team worked.
- Parting Thought: With all the time, effort, and creativity your yearbook staff pours into getting the yearbook together, we think they deserve some recognition.
If you think about it, the index is probably one of the most-flipped-through sections of a yearbook, since everybody digs through it to find where their pictures are in the yearbook. We think it deserves just as much love as you give the rest of your book.
The index is a reference tool, but it can be so much more than just that. You might as well make it awesome.
