The Final Touches: The Yearbook is Complete!

28 May 2026Kionah W, Allard '27

“It was a huge project to complete 272 pages, including candid photos of all 562 students, for our May 1st deadline, but I’m really pleased that the yearbookers pulled it off once again,” shares Yearbook teacher Mr Ganley. 

To the untrained eye, a school yearbook is just a collection of smiling faces, athletic highlights, and memorable goofy senior quotes. It’s a keepsake that sits proudly in households across the world, but behind those 272 finished pages lies a mountain of behind-the-scenes work, endless nights, and a level of dedication people don’t realise is there. Yearbook isn’t just a class; it’s a high-stakes, professional publishing operation with a brutal deadline, and this year, the yearbook team absolutely crushed it. 

Long after the end of academic classes, the yearbook team is still on the clock. While most students do their own thing and have an evening full of relaxation, yearbookers can be found going around campus, cameras in hand, trying to capture every event at the school, or in some cases, travelling off campus. Standing on the sidelines, sitting in the theatre adjusting ISO for the perfect lighting, or getting into the crowd to get the shot, members of yearbook sacrifice their free time for a shot of all 562 students, making sure everyone is included in the final product. 

Once photos are captured, the real work begins. A beautiful yearbook like ours doesn’t just happen overnight: every single layout has to meet very high standard. Pixels matter. Alignment matters. Appeal matters. The team spends countless hours staring at screens, spacing photos, including a variety of ages, groups, grades, classes, arts, teams, and hero shots on each page, and placing each photo like a jigsaw puzzle. 

Meeting these expectations, as our lead aesthete, is Brentwood’s Graphic designer, Ms Rusman, would say, “It makes my job ten times easier.” She finalises all of the work the yearbookers do, making sure it is perfect and up to standard. “We really appreciate everything she does for the yearbook, approving each layout and the countless hours she puts into the yearbook,” says Co-Captain Lulu G, Mack ‘26. 

With almost every page, there is a caption, one of the most overlooked parts of the process is the writing. Coming up with witty, accurate and clever captions is a massive creative practice. The team wants to capture the inside jokes, the energy of the moment and the spirit of the school – and spell everyone is named correctly. How many sets of identical twins are there at this school?

They make sure every single name is spelled correctly, students have to cross-reference their work with a document named “Who’s Been Included”, which holds the name, house and grade of every student at Brentwood; as yearbook captain, Kate M, Alex ‘26 shares “On some occasions this document gets ‘accidentally’ deleted so then we have to do extra work by checking students’ emails.” 

Their job is not done yet! The team continues to work on the supplement for the rest of the year. Doing the same process over, but for the events after the yearbook is submitted for printing on May 1, including Interhouse Track & Field, Concert for a Summer’s Eve, Grade BBQs, CSSRA, and Closing Day Awards. This 40-page supplement arrives during summer break, and gets shipped out to graduating and non-returning students, while returning students get to add the supplement to their yearbook in Sept. 2026.

Once the yearbooks arrives the week of June 5, it’s fun to flip through the seamless pages looking at the photos of all your peers, but most people don’t realise the sheer difficulty of tracking down a few students not yet included in the yearbook, or fixing a spacing issue on a layout. It takes lots of hard work from the yearbook team to get it done for May 1st. They don’t just build a book; they build a time capsule locked in the pages forever. Final touches are done, the pages are being printed, and memories are locked in forever. 

The yearbook is complete! Enjoy!

Kionah W, Allard ‘27