Have you ever wondered about the people responsible for creating the Prep yearbook? Often, they work behind the scenes, reading and editing all 184 pages while meeting strict deadlines, until their efforts are revealed every May and available for the Prep community to enjoy for years to come.
Bella Huynh ’26 and Kayli Tran ’26 are the editors-in-chief of Echo, Prep’s award-winning yearbook team, and have participated in yearbook since their sophomore year. As sophomores, they interviewed students about various activities and wrote copies for the pages. After learning the ropes as underclassmen, Huynh and Tran stepped up to new challenges.
“As a junior, you take on more responsibility,” Tran said. “We started designing the page layouts and putting in photos.”
As senior editors, Huynh and Tran used their years of experience and know-how to integrate their own unique style into yearbook management with the goal of making the successful publication reach higher heights.
“We completely redid our process of how we create the pages, how we organize final deadlines, and how we communicate with our staff, which was a huge task we did this year outside of our regular design, refinement, and logistics,” Huynh said .
Mr. Danielson, the yearbook supervisor, has worked with Huynh and Tran over the course of several years, getting the opportunity to know them better as members of the yearbook team.
“I remember from sophomore year they were very creative and enthusiastic. They just wanted to learn, were eager to try new things, and showed up with a great attitude. Then in junior year they stepped up and I noticed their design ideas were really good. They took initiative to experiment with some layouts and were very responsible with time management to meet deadlines,” said Danielson. Ultimately, these leadership qualities influenced Danielson’s decision to make them editors-in-chief.
“At the end of junior year, I interview all the juniors interested in being an editor-in-chief about their specific skills and their ideas about design, theme, fonts, and colors. Both Kayli and Bella came to that interview with lots of ideas and were very excited to take on that position. I wouldn’t say it was an easy call, but it was,” said Danielson.
With their last Prep yearbook to be published on May 15, Huynh and Tran still have the same excitement that Mr. Danielson saw from their sophomore year to their junior year interview for editor-in-chief. Despite the secrecy of this year’s yearbook theme, Huynh said, “We took a different path than they have in the past 30 years and really tried to incorporate it throughout the book. Each yearbook is going to be different. I hope future yearbook teams just keep pushing the lines trying new ideas beyond the previous issues.”
