The book
Six sections, and five of them behave differently depending on who is making it
Set the band to the school you actually work in and the answers change — not the wording, the answers. That is the point of the first filter, and it is the thing a single product page for all yearbooks cannot do. Every choice is an ordinary link, so this works with nothing switched on.
Narrow it
Which school is making the book
Where it sits in the production year
Showing 4 of 6 sections.
The portrait section
The grid everybody turns to first, and the one with the most names to get right.
Who runs it. The adviser, and in most schools the editors. It is composed from the same library the permissions sit in, so what can be placed is already only what may be placed.
Clubs and teams
Group frames, which is where one refusal costs the most.
Who runs it. Whoever runs the activity, plus the staff. Held against the activity’s own roster, a group frame carries a real participant list rather than a caption typed from memory in April.
The senior or leavers section
Frequently made of photographs the school does not own.
Who runs it. The adviser and the editors, working from imagery a family commissioned elsewhere. That is a specific, revocable arrangement rather than a folder of files, and it is checked again each time it is used.
The index and the names
The least glamorous spread and the one most likely to be wrong in a way that matters.
Who runs it. Generated from the same records the pages were composed from, rather than typed from the pages afterwards.
The senior or leavers section
- What it is
- Seniors go to a studio of their own choosing and the studio holds the frames. The usual resolution is an email chain ending in a download three weeks before a deadline, with no record of what was agreed — which is exactly how a school ends up holding imagery it cannot account for two years later.
- Who runs it
- The adviser and the editors, working from imagery a family commissioned elsewhere. That is a specific, revocable arrangement rather than a folder of files, and it is checked again each time it is used.
- What changes with the band
- It barely exists below high school, which is why this section is absent from an elementary or middle book. In higher education the equivalent is a leavers or commencement section and the person deciding is the graduate rather than a family.
The one section that does not vary
Five of the six change with the band. The print run does not, and it is worth dwelling on why.
Every other part of this product is a question answered when somebody asks it: who may see this, right now. The print run converts that into a question answered once, permanently, on the day an adviser signs it off. From that moment the book is a physical object and none of the machinery applies to it.
That is not a limitation we intend to engineer around, because there is nothing to engineer. It is the reason the design puts its effort into composition rather than into viewing: the only useful place to be careful about a book is before it exists.
It also explains the one piece of advice worth giving any adviser regardless of what software they use. Whatever your process is, make the last thing before sign-off a rebuild rather than a read-through. A read-through finds what a person notices. A rebuild finds what changed.
The production year, in the order it actually happens
The second filter is the calendar, because advisers do not think in features. They think in what is due.
Gathering runs from the first week to somewhere around February and is the stage where a book is won or lost. Material that arrives attached to the people in it can be placed; material that arrives as a file cannot, and no amount of effort in April fixes an autumn of loose files.
Composing is the visible part and the shortest. It is also where a system either survives a forty-minute period with student editors or does not, which is a question no feature list answers.
Proofing is where the index and the pages have to agree, and where the two-lists problem shows up if it is going to. This is the stage most improved by deriving rather than typing.
After the print run is the shortest section on this site and the one people forget. What you hold afterwards is a record of what you published, which matters the first time somebody asks a question about a book from four years ago.
The three questions worth asking any yearbook system
Including this one. They are the questions whose answers actually change what happens in April, and none of them appears on a feature comparison.
Where do the pages get their photographs from? If the answer is a folder, a drive or a download, then every permission decision made after that download was taken is invisible to the book. That is not a criticism of anyone’s workflow; it is a description of what a copy is. If the answer is that pages are built from the same place the permissions live, ask to see what happens when a permission changes.
Where does the index come from? If it is typed from the finished pages, you have two lists, and two lists disagree. It is the single most reliable source of errata in this whole category and it is entirely avoidable.
What happens the week a family withdraws? Ask for the actual sequence, not the capability. The useful distinction is between a system where the answer is a rebuild and one where the answer is a search, because a search performed at speed by whoever is available is a search that misses something.
A system that answers all three well may still be wrong for your programme for other reasons. A system that cannot answer them is going to cost you an errata sheet.
What this list is not
It is our description of our own capability. There are no students’ photographs on this site, no example pages, no sample rosters and nothing resembling anybody’s real data. Nothing typed into the address bar reaches what you are reading.
A demonstration against your own book is a different thing: real setup work, after a conversation with a person, never before.