Well, I'm working late tonite as I'm collating our school's yearbooks. This year we are printing them in-house rather then shipping them over to a printer. Although Office Max will be binding them for us, we have decided to print them ourselves. The reason we do an in-house yearbook is because we have a small student body and it works out to be a great lesson in marketing, creative writing, photography, book layouts, and much more for the students. For the last 4 years, I have been in charge of the school's yearbook and each year we have manage to out do ourselves.
This year is no exception as we are printing our yearbook in full color on a Xerox Work Center 7132 printer/copier/fax/email station. It's an amazng device and the color pages look beautiful. Most of the students have no idea that the yearbook will be in color this year. Normally, we only have a handful of pages that are color, but having the whole book is quite an achievement for our little school!
In case you are wondering how we do this, we use MS Publisher to create our pages and then we used Primo PDF to convert them to PDF files to ensure everything works and looks right. After that we print away. The students have been using their own digital cameras through the year and I have been using my Panasonic Lumix DMC-F27. Overall, I highly recommend this process for schools that may not be able to afford a traditional yearbook. It's a great experience for the kids and it's a satisfying experience. Nothing beats seeing the looks of the students as they look through their yearbooks!
By the way, the picture above is our yearbook front cover.
