Year after year, students and “yerds” (Yearbook-nerds) alike tirelessly await the arrival of the latest edition of Echo, Prep’s student-run yearbook.
However, the process of creating a yearbook starts in May, when applications to join are sent to interested freshmen. Then, over the summer, the staff attends a yearbook camp at the University of Puget Sound and chooses a theme to focus on.
Kayli Tran ’26 is a designer for Echo. She, like all designers, spent her first year on staff writing “copies,” or descriptions of different Prep activities and trends that are featured on many pages. Now, in her second-year on staff, she collaborates with other designers and photographers to create layouts and graphics for the pages of the yearbook.
Photographers, or ‘togs,’ make up a key part of the Echo staff. Designers rely on the images ‘togs’ capture at various Prep events to display on their pages each year.
“Yearbook is a lot of work because there are a lot of small aspects that go into each page that you have to focus on. It’s a long process because you start with the basic layout, then find your pictures and you have to communicate with the togs,” Tran ’26 described.
Senior Delaney Dorscht is one of Echo’s two editors-in-chief and shared that her role mostly involves overseeing the staff’s work. “My favorite part is to see it all come together and also flow well together,” Dorscht ’25 said. “I think that is a big thing we focus on with design elements and colors; you want each page to be unique, but you want the whole book to be come together and be cohesive.”
At the beginning of the year, Dorscht and her co-editor-in-chief Nina Trujillo ’25 randomly assigned pages for the designers to work on. Dorscht explained, “We have a sophomore, junior and senior working on each page and they each have a different role.”
There are four major deadlines that the Echo staff works to meet throughout the year. These deadlines, in December, February, March and April, each require about 40 finalized pages. Fall sports and activities pages usually make up the first deadline, while Spring happenings are sent in for the final deadline.
Mr. Danielson is celebrating his 30th Echo publication as staff advisor. He shared, “I still love it. It’s amazing and it’s so satisfying to work with students starting with the blank slate and going to the end of the final product. When you pop those boxes open and smell that ink… it’s so gratifying seeing all that work kind of come out at once.”
