How To Create A Senior Yearbook Ad

Making a stellar senior yearbook ad can feel like a pop quiz in creativity. A senior page should reflect the student's personality and document who they are at this exciting time in their life. Since it's going to be immortalized in the yearbook, it also needs to look good and we can help you make a legendary one!

Whether you're designing an ad as a surprise for your fave senior or you're a graduate-to-be who's DIY-ing your own page, PicMonkey has plenty of tools and inspiration to help you craft a polished, personalized look. Let's take a look at what you'll need to start, some all-star design ideas, and how to easily create your ad in PicMonkey.

What you'll need

Before you put the pedal to the metal — or, ya know, the cursor to the canvas — round up a couple things. Having everything at the ready makes designing a lot easier.

Photos. Senior ads can feature one or multiple photos. These can be senior portraits, childhood pics, candid shots that show off their favorite activities — whatever you like. And if a great pic seems unusable thanks to a blemish, easily banish that zit with our touch up tools.
Dimensions. Decide whether you're designing a full, half, or quarter page senior ad. If you only know the dimensions in inches, multiply each dimension by 300 to convert it to pixels (we have a handy chart if you don't wanna math it). This will help you set the right canvas or collage dimensions, so you can keep an eye on proportions, avoid image quality issues, and get a better idea of how your design will look when it's published.

There are at least 5,698,907 different design possibilities for your senior ad when you create one in the collage style. Use PicMonkey's collage tool to make a gridded collage by choosing a layout, and then filling the cells with photos, and adding text or graphics.

Or get started with a template. Browse our graduation card templates or grad announcement templates for quick designs!

Go black and white and color all over

This senior ad design is good as gold, with a trio of black and white pics offsetting one in-color image. Showing older pics, from childhood for instance, looks great in black and white accompanied by a modern pic of your grad in color.

Thrice as nice

Try a trio of photos for a senior yearbook ad that is triple the fun. Try three different angles from the same photo shoot, or show your grad growing up at three different stages in their life.

Simple and bold with photo & text

This design is all about one great pic and a simple text caption because sometimes less is more. Play with fonts (we have nearly 400!) to achieve the look you want, and consider pairing two fonts together for a visually interesting look.

Add a design flourish with graphics

Photos and text are nice, but sometimes you want to go that extra mile with a cool design graphic or two. The layered scrapbook look is popular on Instagram, and you can get the same aesthetic in your senior yearbook page with graphics like these from our Illustrated Plants collection, and the Scrapbooky Tape collection.

Combine photos and shapes for a mod look

Shapes are another big senior page design trend. To add some to your masterpiece, check out our Geometric Shapes graphics. Move them around, adjust the size, and erase parts of the graphic using our graphic tools.

When it comes to colors, try to stick to a palette of up to three. Too many, and your design may not look as polished. To make a graphic or text match a hue in your photo, use the eyedropper tool. You'll find it on the palette that hovers over your image when you click a text box or graphic.

Open one of our templates.
Swap out text and images with your own.
Customize your design with graphics, photo effects, and textures.
If needed, size your design using our Resize tool.

Downloading for print

Take a peek at this article, How to Make a High Resolution Image for Print , so that you can hand off a high-quality image to the yearbook committee. When downloading your file from PicMonkey to your computer, keep in mind that PNG files are better quality than JPG files, so if you can use this format, do it.