3 R’s of Breaking Yearbook Rules

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Corning Painted Post West HS •Painted Post, NY

HeadlineRule: Place headlines directly above the story.Reason: The purpose of the headline is to draw readers into the text by making sure they continue reading the story once they finish the larger headline.Reconciliation: Headlines may go below or to either side of the story if a leading letter or graphic element that corresponds with the headline draws the reader back to the story’s beginning so the copy still gets read.

White SpaceRule: Do not trap white space. All elements maintain one pica of white space from each other.Reason: Readers’ eyes are drawn to “holes.” A consistent one pica internal margin provides order.Reconciliation: Use extra white space to purposely draw attention to a key element, such as a headline. Use more than one pica of white space to separate packages. Use less than one pica within packages to show unity. Many of today’s designers recognize 3 levels of white space.

DominanceRule: Make the dominant photo 2 or 3 times as big as any other photo on the page.Reason: Readers need a dominant element to grab their attention and bring them into the spread.Reconciliation: Increasing coverage with more than the traditional 5-7 photos per spread led designers to reduced the dominant’s size. To compensate, crop tighter to imply dominance or team smaller dominants with other photos to create dominant photo packages.

CaptionsRule: Do not stack more than two captions on top of or next to each other. Captions must touch the photo they represent.Reason: Make it easy for readers to find the caption that goes with each picture.Reconciliation: Clustered photos made it nearly impossible to avoid stacking captions. One “fix” is to number photos and captions to help readers find the match. These captions tend to be shorter than the traditional 2-3 sentences.

Spread unityRule: Establish an eyeline –preferably a third from the top or bottom – and break it with no more than one element. Bleed one photo through the gutter. Reason: Present the two separate pages as one combined spread. Reconciliation: Instead of the one eyeline breaking element being a single picture or copy block, it may be a combined package. The gutter may stay intact as long as the spread is visually unified using other methods such as color harmony or graphic placement.

Copy LegibilityRule: Never place words across the gutter or over a picture.Reason: Letters may be lost in the gutter, making the word hard to read. Copy over a photo may also be hard to read or compromise the integrity of the photograph.Reconciliation: Display type of at least 36 points may be used carefully across the gutter with extra space allowed for the binding. Respect the picture’s subject and only place headlines or captions over “dead” space.

San Gabriel HS •San Gabriel, CA

W.T. Woodson HS • Fairfax, VA

Walnut HS • Walnut, CA

Chantilly HS • Chantilly, VA

Ponderosa HS •Parker, CO