The most important part of any yearbook are the photographs. One of the easiest ways to make your yearbook look bad is to have poor photographs. When taking pictures, try to keep in mind a few general tips that will help keep your yearbook looking first class.

1. Make sure you buy a good camera. Talk to a local camera shop and make an informed decision when choosing your yearbook camera. (Especially if you are buying a digital camera)
2. Make sure you have plenty of lighting. Try to take all of your pictures in well lit areas. When possible, zoom in as much as you can. Whether you are taking your pictures on a digital camera or a regular camera, it is always better to zoom in before you take the picture than to try to enlarge it on the computer afterwards.
3. Take plenty of pictures. Remember, it is always better to have too many pictures than not enough.

Try to keep the overall design of your yearbook uniform. In order to save time, try to use the same basic page layouts throughout your book. This will save you hours of design time.

Work with a program that you are familiar with. If you spend $600 or more to buy a brand new desktop publishing program that you don’t know how to use, it will be a waste of time and money. You don’t want to have to learn how to use a program and try to design a yearbook all at the same time. Yearbooks take a lot of work. We will cover how to convert your files to a format that we need later on.

Make sure you have the correct margins before you start. We require a minimum of 1/2” all the way around your page. We prefer 5/8” inch all the way around when possible. You must make sure you set this up before you start so that you will not have to change it later on.

Try to use pictures over 200 dpi. Pictures that are scanned in or imported in at less than 200 dpi will usually come out grainy or pixilated. If you have any questions about dpi, you can contact us for more information.

Make your pages colorful. Because of the printing process that we use, you are not limited in the amount of color you use on your page. (If you are printing a full color yearbook.) Go ahead and use as many pictures, clipart, backgrounds, etc, that you want.

At FBCP we can design your cover for you or you can design one yourself. If you plan on doing your own, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Your cover will be printed on a 12 x 18 inch sheet of paper but the finished size of the book will be 8 1/2 x 11. The easiest way to set this up on your computer is to work from the middle out. Start at the 9 inch mark on the paper and work to the right for the front cover and to the left for the back cover.

Remember to leave room for a spine if you are doing a perfect bound yearbook. (your book will be perfect bound if it is over 52 pages)

Don’t forget to leave plenty of margin. You must allow no less than 1/2 inch all the way around the front and back cover due to machine tolerances.

File Types. In order for us to be able to print your book, we must have it in the correct file type. We prefer to get everything in PDF format. To do this, you must either have Adobe Acrobat Distiller installed on your computer or another third party software that converts your files to PDF. You can contact Adobe to find out more information on this product. (Sometimes, we can convert your Microsoft Publisher, CorelDraw or Adobe PageMaker files to PDF in house. Call us for pricing information.)

Pick a program that you are comfortable with. Because everything must be converted to PDF format before you send it, you can use virtually any desktop publishing program that you wish. Sometimes, we can accept your original files and convert them on site. The only problem with this is making sure all of the fonts transfer correctly from your computer to ours. If we are converting your file for you, try to either send us all of the fonts that you used in your yearbook or just use common Microsoft fonts.

The list of programs that we can accept are as follows: Microsoft Publisher (XP or older), CorelDraw (Version 12 or older), Adobe PageMaker (Version 7.0 or older) and Adobe Photoshop (CS version or older). All other programs must be converted to PDF before we can accept your yearbook.

Please send us separate files. When you set up your yearbook, try to limit each file to one or two pages each. This will keep the file sizes smaller. If you are sending PDF files, you can either combine all of them in a single PDF file (in the correct order) or make each page a separate file. Be sure to send the cover as it’s own separate file. Do not combine it with the inside of the book.

Thank you for letting us be a part of your ministry. If you have any questions about this information or questions on things not covered in this packet, please feel free to contact us at: 1-800-440-5579 or locally at (772) 461-6460.