Camp helps yearbook students capture memories

SANDPOINT — This August, six Sandpoint high schoolers attended the Inland Northwest Yearbook Camp at Eastern Washington University. They brought home memories of movie making with friends, a clear vision for this season’s yearbook and a design award.

Berkeley Cox, Madeleine Mitchell, Kayla Beers, Lucca Grillo, James Cornelius and Kasten Grimm, along with their adviser, Mindy Roget, attended the three-day camp with other high schoolers involved in their schools’ yearbooks. They stayed in dorms, ate meals, listened to keynote speakers, and participated in breakout sessions. Speakers focused on topics like how to edit for peers in a positive way and how to build class culture.

The camp is hosted annually by Herff Jones, a company that sells products and merchandise related to schools. They also specialize in yearbook publishing and design.

Monticola, Sandpoint High School’s yearbook, is named after another word for the Western White Pine Tree, Cox said. The tree is an inspiration for the logo, design, and name of the school’s publication. Each year, yearbook staff develop a color palette and theme statement. Last year’s book — “Explore. Create. Imagine.” — followed a coral-and-blue scheme. This year, the team developed new ideas through workshops at the camp.

Cox, assistant editor in chief for Monticola, said theme development was a main component of their yearbook staff’s experience. Usually, the team attends yearbook camp in August to develop a theme that will unify the yearbook. Yearbook staff work on creating the yearbook, gathering material, and designing publication layout throughout the school year until the book goes to print in May. Camp creates an ideal environment for brainstorming design elements like fonts, theme statements and inspiration.

While they can’t reveal direct inspiration, Cox said the team is aiming for a minimalist design with fonts like serif and sans-serif for the 2024 publication.

“This year we’ve developed an alternative to a color palette,” Cox said. “We want each page to be unique. Our goal is for readers to be surprised at every turn by how different, yet uniform each page is.”

Lucca Grillo, editor-in-chief of Monticola, said the team hopes to highlight distinctive perspectives that may not be featured in common yearbooks.

“The direction we’ve gone with the book this year is to really explore individuals’ stories and unique high school experiences,” Grillo said. “This pushed us to make some unconventional decisions when developing a theme.”

After the team presented excerpts from Monticola at camp, they were presented with an award for “Best Visual Interpretation.” Their designs were inspired by a popular magazine — the name of which they are keeping a secret for now, Roget said.

Cox said the camp helped her identify the importance of good leadership in putting together a yearbook. She said she was personally impacted by a speaker who traveled from New York to talk with high schoolers about leadership roles within yearbook classes. Her team is motivated to apply what they learned to this season’s endeavors.

“This year we really want to connect with everybody that’s in the class, form a relationship with each student, and make sure everyone understands the importance of what we’re doing,” Cox said. “As our old advisor said — we’re creating a piece of history. People will use this (yearbook) to look back on and for records. We want to make sure everybody is having fun but also understands the importance of what we’re doing and how important it is to go to games, get quotes, and collect all the material.”