Help with a yearbook?? Any related help appreciated.

[Alexcalibur]

Hello, I am with the US Navy and I am looking to create a cruisebook/yearbook for an exercise that we did this summer. It won't be anything huge, I just have pictures that I would like to have printed in a book. 

I have zero experience with any kind of yearbook, so I am not sure where to start. It will be a one off book. I currently have subscriptions to photoshop and lightroom, but I have seen people online recommend InDesign?

Any help or direction is appreciated

[minibois]

10 minutes ago, Alexcalibur said:

but I have seen people online recommend InDesign?

InDesign is indeed the 'correct' program to use for any type of printed bookwork.

I say 'correct' in quotation marks though, because there are other programs not made for this work, but would still be fit for this use.

 

The reason inDesign is recommend is because of its specific toolset made for printed material, which includes:

- Vector based, as opposed to raster (pixel) based, which allows for infinite scaling up/down of graphics (whereas with pixel based objects you can't really upscale without trying to add detail). Of course this doesn't apply when you're importing raster based objects (i.e. photos).

- Page based: a yearbook of course doesn't consist of one page, but rather many pages. InDesign has an easy system to work on all these pages

- Template based: even though your yearbook will feature many pages, a lot of these will have the same template to them (i.e. you might have a few pages with people listed with their name/quote/photo, but otherwise these pages are the same. Keeping the same template - without needless copy-pasting - is a lot easier

- Exporting? The last time I've used InDesign - or other DTP programs - has been years ago, but I'd almost assume it might be easier to export something to a printing company, but not sure.

 

But all this stuff can be done in a program like Photoshop, or maybe preferably a vector programs - such as Adobe Illustrator (paid) or Inkscape (free) - just with some more hurdles to achieve the effect of the tools listed above.

There are alternatives to InDesign too of course, as listed by AlternativeTo: https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-indesign/

The last time I've used InDesign has been yeeeeaaars ago and I haven't used these other DTP programs, so a lot of my experience is just 'on paper', but hope it helps give an idea why the program would be recommended.