For the past several years, I have made a top effort to capture our own personal memories and catalog our lives; not just for us, but for our someday-children and grandchildren. It’s important to me to preserve the normal moments in life, not just the vacations or the funny stories, but the normal things that we do day in and day out.

I started this in 2009, the year we got married, and, at the time, used Photoshop to painstakingly create each and every page layout.

It. Was. A. Mess.

But I did it that way for 2 years because I didn’t know a better way. Enter InDesign. (I use this program for all of my bridal album designs as well.) Many of you have asked so here’s my workflow on keeping our yearbook up to date throughout the year (getting behind makes the catch-up horrible!).

1. Social Media. Because I do so much online between twitter, facebook, instagram, and blogging, I combine a lot of those things in the book so that I’m not rewriting my thoughts.
   1. Twitter: To grab my tweets, I use TwimeMachine. (I purposely post all of my instagrams to twitter as well so that I can keep all the dates organized. At this time, instagram doesn’t date stamp a post, but rather gives you a rough estimate of when it was, i.e. “2 weeks ago”.) It’s then an easy copy/paste from TwimeMachine into my layout in InDesign. I then just clean up the type a bit by removing the time stamp and leaving just the date.
   2. Instagram: Like I said above, my instagram feed is combined with my twitter feed, but to pull in my actual photos, I either grab them directly from my computer (after syncing my phone with my photos file) or from Webstagram. I can simply drag the photo from online into my layout and keep going. It usually ends up being easier this way since everything is in perfect order.
   3. Facebook: I do not sync twitter with facebook anymore because it felt so overloaded and overthought to, for example, instagram a photo and have it appear in three different feeds. Freeing up my cross-access from twitter to facebook also gave me more leeway to use twitter as it was intended instead of worrying about clogging up my friends’ facebook feed.  I rarely post to facebook anymore unless it’s on my business page and, since my yearbook is personal, I don’t worry about transferring that information.
   4. Blogging: As for my blog posts, I just copy/paste the content over and then work on the layout from there. Again, I only use blog posts that have been tagged as “personal”, not business related posts.

1. Personal Items
   1. Yes, I do write things that do not make it on the blog. Most times it’s simply because it’s too personal. One particular time that sticks out was last fall: I shared quite a bit when my grandma passed away last September, but I also saved a lot of that period of time from online access; there were some terribly sad, low points for me and our family and I wanted to keep those private for everyone’s sake. While I share quite a bit about my life on here, I also want to honor a boundary. At the same time, my feelings are legit and I don’t want to overlook that so I write them down and include them in our yearbook; struggles, triumphs, funny things, the whole gamut.
   2. While most of the personal photos I take anymore are from my iPhone, I still get out and photograph just for fun and sometimes take my camera to family events or what have you. Those photos may end up on here or on facebook, but probably not all of them simply because of overload. I don’t have to worry about that with my yearbook because I can rearrange the layouts to accommodate as many photos as I want.
   3. I make it a rule to never worry about page counts in this book. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right and I will pay for the extra pages if I run long.
2. Layout/Design Notes
   1. While I design everything in InDesign (currently using CS5.5), I print this particular book through Blurb. I have been using Blurb for about 5 years now and have always loved their quality. For my yearbooks, I always order the Standard Portrait (8×10), hard cover image wrap with standard paper. (Because my books have so many pages, I do not have a choice on paper type, but I have found that standard works fine.)
   2. By the way, Blurb offers an amazing FREE design program for people who don’t have their own. Also, check out their instagram and facebook books. If you’re big into either of those, this would save you oodles of time while still preserving your photos/memories that you’ve put online.
   3. I always split up the yearbook by doing month-by-month layouts. I typically use magazines like Martha Stewart, Real Simple, and CB2 for design inspiration. I love the clean lines that they use.
   4. Doing month-by-month designs has also helped me keep up to date throughout the year. Though, admittedly, I slack during the summer when I’m at my busiest of the wedding season.
3. Workflow
   1. Some things remain constant during each month. For example, I always have my twitter/instagram feed as well as the “Funny Things We Say” segment. Those are easy enough to create a template to reuse every month.
   2. I never know how many pages I’ll use in each layout so I design sequentially by date.
   3. I like to use easy-to-read fonts for the content. If I do anything crazy, it will only be with the title. I used to be more amateur in my font usage and it ended up that I couldn’t read what I had written. Now, I stick to mostly sans serif or serif typefaces.
   4. I also create a template for the month start. I try to keep the overall look the same month-to-month. I have created my own contents, ranging from “love & family” to “travel the world”. I then add the page number and title of that month’s content to that month’s contents page.

5. Extras
   1. I don’t take a ton of video, but when I do, I upload it to youtube (sometimes publicly and sometimes privately; depends) and create a QR code for that link. I then place the QR code into my yearbook so that I can simply scan it with my phone and watch the video when I’m flipping through the book.

I would be lying if I said that keeping this book up to date is easy. It takes work and it took me a long time to figure out my rhythm. By now, wrapping up my 4^th year, I feel like I know what works for me, what my design style is, and I’ve ironed out my workflow. So, yes, it takes work, but I love doing it. I love writing down our memories and looking back through them. I love seeing photos in print instead of simply online. I love holding a book—our book—in my hands and seeing how we’ve changed and grown.

Every single piece of it is so worth it to me.

Feel free to leave a comment if you’re interested in starting your own yearbook or link up if you’re already doing it. Hope this helps answer some of your questions!