Find inspiration for unique yearbook themes that will make the grade.
By Robin Raven Robin RavenRobin Raven is a freelance writer and editor with over a decade of experience contributing to magazines, newspapers, books, and websites.
Updated June 22, 2023
Like a bustling newsroom piecing together a breaking story, high school yearbook committees have the Herculean task of condensing an entire year's worth of memories and accomplishments into a few pages. While you can get away with a few grainy photos, a last-minute theme won't cut it.
Whether you're an aspiring graphic designer, journalist, or just needed an extra credit to graduate, your creative voice matters. Don't be afraid to put your wildest and most ambitious high school yearbook themes in the running. And, if you've tapped out your creative tank for the day, we've got a ton of cool theme ideas to get your wheels turning.
Get creative and play around with these yearbook theme ideas. The're just the start of where you can take your high school's yearbook to this year. It can be easy to make a yearbook that you and your friends would marvel over, but it's important to be inclusive of all the groups, activities, and clubs in your school. It's time to memorialize your high school experience in the eye-catchiest way possible.
The idea of time is a versatile but always relevant theme for a high school yearbook. You may opt to place different images, photos, and drawings of how you keep time throughout the book. You may even decide to use different time-keeping methods to represent each section. For example, an hourglass may represent the senior class, while a wake-up alarm screen may be more appropriate for the first-year students.
Choose a pretty font to use for placing quotes about time or lyrics from songs that reference time throughout the book. Of course, no time-centered yearbook theme would be complete without a reference to high school being the time of one's life (at least so far!).
There's a reason those "the year you were born" quizzes and articles are such popular clickbait. People love to explore pop culture through a thing that connects to them directly. Trends are always changing, and it'll be so funny to come back in 20 years and look back at what social media challenge you and your friends were up to.
Consider creating pages that resemble TikTok, Instagram, or other popular social media apps' layouts and including lists of the top 10 in movies, music, television, and current events throughout the yearbook.
There's been a massive resurgence in superheroes in the past two decades, and the concept could be an awesome yearbook theme for you to consider. Use a comic strip style layout to feature photos of students and their amazing accomplishments.
From pictures that show the superheroes who bring school plays to life (whether on stage or behind the scenes), to those who serve as class officers, participate in service projects, tutor younger students, and more, there are plenty of ways to highlight how students make their school, and the world, a better place.
You can also tie in the pop culture element by including a few quotes from superhero movies or graphic novels. Poll students to find out which famous superheroes mean the most to them and publish the results.
If you want a tongue-in-cheek yearbook, emojis are a great option. After all, high schoolers have been communicating with emojis their whole lives, so you and your classmates are the most qualified to use them to reflect on the school year.
Instead of asking each student to include their favorite quote or saying, ask them to choose (or create) an emoji that sums up their feelings about the current academic year, and publish it beside each person's class photo. Come up with creative emoji backgrounds, frames, or watermarks to add emphasis to pages that feature student life photos. You could even have an emoji artwork contest in which students design class emojis that sum up the overall school year.
Each school year poses its own challenges and opportunities, including situations that require teens to demonstrate just how resilient they are as individuals as well as a generation. No matter what individual differences and unique identities exist among members of the student body, resilience is a trait that everyone likely shares.
Salute various ways students persevered and rose above challenges by highlighting examples of never-give-up behavior. For instance, you can ask class members to contribute photos illustrating the various ways they pitched in to help with localized challenges, such as cleaning up after an extreme weather event or other community concerns.
