Book Builder

Use Book Builder to Quickly Layout your Yearbook Project

If you’re looking for a way to get your book design done and your pages filled up fast, use our book builder to get the job done.

How to Access Book Builder

To access the book builder, start by opening any page in the EDO designer, You can do this by going to Design -> Page Design from the top toolbar of the website.

Page design

Once you have a page open, to access the book builder you will go to the Templates menu from the left toolbar, and click Templates > Browse Themes

Settings book builder

Next, you will be taken to the book building home screen. Click on the blue ‘Select Theme’ button to choose the theme for your yearbook.

Theme builder button

Themes We Offer

Our book builder offers 9 unique themes that our design specialists came up with specifically for yearbook design. Each theme is laid out in the way our designers imagined the yearbook would look like. But don’t let that stop you from being creative! Once the theme is installed, all the pages are still editable. You can remove or change any page you would like. The 9 pre-designed themes we offer are:

You also have the option to copy the contents of a previous year’s book into your account.

Previous Yearbook

The first drop-down lets you choose what previous yearbook you would like to use. It can be last year’s yearbook or the year before that, or the year before that!

The second drop-down lets you choose if you would like to import the photos from previous years into your account. If you select “Yes – Import with Photos“, the template contents along with the photos you used in your book last year will be cloned into your current account. If you select ‘No – Substitute with Drop Photo Here boxes,” the photos you placed in your book last year will NOT be imported to your account and they will be replaced with gray, “drop photo here” boxes as a filler. When you are ready to replace the photo with an actual photo from your school year you can by simply selecting a photo from manage photos and clicking on the drop photo here image.

Preview your Theme Before you Install it

By selecting a theme that you are interested in from the list above, you will be taken to a second screen that lets you preview the theme in full. On the left-hand side of the page, you will see the cover of the theme, with a short description of the template styles that are offered in the theme, along with a rating right under the cover. This is a popularity rating that is based off how often this theme has been installed in other users yearbooks.

This is one example of a theme we offer, Comic Book. Each theme has a description like this where you can see the unique contents and the cover of the theme

On the right side of the page you will see a Ladder Layout. This is a preview of the templates that will be placed in your book, and the order they will be placed in. Once the theme is installed you can edit or change these pages. You can also move pages with out page move feature.

Ladder Layout

When you are ready to take the plunge and install a theme, click the install button under the theme description. If you would like to look at more themes, click the “view more themes button.

Install theme

Before installing the theme into your yearbook, you have a choice of “replacing” what’s in your book already with the theme you chose, which will completely replace everything in the yearbook. So, if you have any photos in your yearbook at this point they will be replaced. If you would like to keep the photos that you already placed in your book, then you should select the “update,” which will keep any photos you have already placed in your yearbook project.

Update or replace photos

If you have any pages that you already designed that you would like to keep in your yearbook, save the pages as templates before you install the theme. This way you can replace the page once the theme is installed. To learn how to save your page as a template click here

Please allow a few minutes for your theme to install into your yearbook. Once it is done your page previews will update, and you can go in and start designing your yearbook!

Editing your Book Once a Theme is Installed

Once you install a theme you will see that a template will be placed on every page of your book.

If you would like to change or replace a template, you can go to the left-hand side of the screen and click the “template” button:

If you search the name of the theme in the keyword search on the template page, you will see a list of templates also offered in that theme that you can use in your book. You can also search for other templates that you may want to include in your book that don’t quite match the theme, like holiday templates.

You can also move pages around in your yearbook. For example, if the student portrait pages are in the front of your book, but the book builder installed them in the back of your book, click on the move page button to move them around. Click here to learn more about moving pages.

You can also save pages as templates to give yourself more flexibility with designing. For example, if you already designed a page, and you would like to keep it in your yearbook.

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