Earlier this month, I asked students to select SlidesCarnival presentations that would make a good yearbook theme. Many students liked the Color Light Bulbs template. Click here to use the template I modified for a yearbook created in Google Slides.
When creating a yearbook, it is important to use font pairs like Amatic SC for the title and Encode Sans Semi Condensed for the body.
What is the difference between Title and Body text? Titles are one word or short phrase. A fancy font like Amatic is easy to read. However, the same font as a sentence is harder to read, which is why Encode is a better choice for captions.
While I write Body Text on the Font Pairs slide, I use the Subtitle placeholder text when editing the theme. Body placeholder text gets super confusing when adding multiple caption sections.
Creating a yearbook in Google Slides is easier today than it was in 2016. One major reason is the color palette.
Click on a fill, border, or text color. The top row contains the Theme colors. In this template, the Text and background colors are black, white, and two shades of grays. The Accent colors are tropical colors that include two shades of cyan. Another gray and a shade of black finish the palette.
Another addition to Slides that makes creating yearbooks easier is the Image placeholder in Edit theme. Images placed in the circle will be automatically cropped. I used the Subtitle text placeholder for captions.
The circle image placeholders worked well with the lightbulb theme. The two-page layout is perfect for the Student Body Officers section.
Students click on the image on top of the slide to easily insert images from Google Drive.
If you want add more light bulbs to a page, go to slides 14 and 15. Copy and paste those objects as you like.
The 2-page spread with 48 individual portratis works with the Slides Create add-on that is currently in beta.
I was curious if I could shape the portraits into light bulbs using shapes instead of textboxes for the mail merge. That would have been super cool.
Unfortunately, the current code pushes a rectangular shape. Of course, you could have students crop the image one by one. Maybe I will add crop shape to future versions of the add-on.
If you choose to use or modify the Color Light Bulb yearbook template, please give credit to SlidesCarnival.com for their original design.