Holidays: How Students Celebrate

Incorporating holiday celebrations into your yearbook can bring about pages that are both unique and creative. Think about your school’s student body. Do the students in your school celebrate Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Passover or Kwanza? If so, then why not design a page that features the important aspects of each holiday. Interview students about holiday traditions, favorite foods or events. If there are a group of students who celebrate Chinese New Year, for example, ask if you could meet with them outside of school and get some group photos of them making or eating traditional food, showcasing their traditional attire or attending parades. You could even shoot a video interview with the students and include it on the page with a QR Code. Or maybe if you’re really lucky, you’ll get invited to the actual celebration and you could take a video of the festivities—with permission from the hosts, of course.

There are a variety of ways to feature holiday celebrations. We recommend dividing the year into four seasons, designate one spread for each season and feature a collage of all the holidays during that time of year. This gives you plenty of space to showcase the holidays without using all of your yearbook real estate to do so.

As far as design is concerned, think about the key aspects of each holiday’s celebrations: what colors are the MOST important, what imagery (dragons, turkeys, etc.) is associated with the holiday, etc. Use these to tell the holiday stories and to set them apart from each other. Use different fonts for each holiday and have fun with the photos. Don’t have all of your photos be straight and horizontally aligned on the page. Have some titled on angles, crop others with round and beveled tools, use outlines and borders—and above all, do something slightly different for each holiday to make it stand out from the others.