Before you start, do yourself a big favour and create a YEARBOOK folder in ONEDRIVE. Put ALL of your elements in there! Every time you download or create anything for this project, put it in that folder! (and, of course, make sure that OneDrive is running on your computer!)

Putting everything into a folder now will save you a lot of headaches, trust me!

Go to the HandOut folder and download the files into your yearbook folder: YearbookPagesTemplate

Start by opening the supplied Template file (yearbookPages.indd)

 

Save your file into your Yearbook folder.

 

When using InDesign, I prefer to use the Essential Classics workspace, so that’s what my screen will look like, but choose whichever workspace is best for you.

 

Your Pages panel right now should look like this:

I recommend going into your Layers panel. Right now you have two layers:

The Parent Items layer is locked. It contains your page numbers.

If you want to change the look of the page numbers or add text to the bottom of every page (like the year or school’s name or whatever), you would go into the Parent/Master pages by double clicking on A-Document Master in the Pages panel

Either now or later, after you’ve decided on a page design, I recommend unlocking the Parent Items layer and customizing the look of the page numbers

On the bottom left and bottom right, you will see a capital A. This will be replaced by the number of whatever page it appears on. You should at some point highlight that

and choose your own Font, Size, and Colour (or any other option you wish)

You could also add the school’s name, the year, or any other elements that you would like to appear on all of your pages

For example:

 

If you want to, you could add a background image or a logo or something that would appear on all of your pages. Note that it would be highly unusual to have the exact same background on a bunch of different pages, but sometimes they have a similar look. If you do want something to appear on every page, while you’re in the Parent/Master page, you could use the Frame tool (press F on your key   board) and draw a frame that goes to the edges of your pages (or put a smaller box at the bottom or whatever)

 

PUT THE FRAME ON A SEPARATE, BOTTOM LAYER

Add a new layer at the bottom of the Layers panel:

Move that new layer (layer 3) down to the bottom of the pile:

you can double click on the layer name to change it

 

For the next step, I’m going to stay on the bottom layer (background). Use the Frame tool (letter F) to create a frame that goes all the way to the edge of the page. This will be my actual page background for each page. Place any picture in there to act as a placeholder. I used a picture of the school, because if I ever forget to replace it, at least I’ve got something appropriate. You can get school photos HERE if you want to do that too.

The photo that I used doesn’t fill the frame:

So I’ll have to go into Frame Fitting and “Fill frame proportionally” (the first one.) I always like to turn on Auto-Fit as well:

That looks much better:

 

Now I have a frame ready to go that I can change on individual pages.

 

I notice now that my page numbers and that text aren’t showing up well, so I’ll take some time to edit that. I’ll add a fill colour into the Text frames:

If you fill in a frame, you’ll notice that the text is too close to the edge. I recommend adding some Inset Spacing, which is basically a bit of a margin in a text box. Select the text box with the Selection tool and press Ctrl + B

For my text, adding about .03 in of Inset Spacing fixed the problem and still allowed my text to fit. I also like to make sure my text aligns to the Center instead of the top:

 

Lastly, I recommend taking that top layer and locking it. Do not put any page elements on a layer above this unless you want to cover the page numbers. This layer should always be at the top.

You can decide whether to lock the background layer or not. I’ll lock mine and cover it up or edit it later as necessary

Now if you switch to any other page, you’ll see its number in those spots! If you put all of your designs on the layers below, those page numbers will always show on every page.

If you haven’t done so already, SAVE your work!