EZ or PRO Designer
Interchangeable between yearbook pages, Senior pages, ads, and user types.
EZ Designer for Quick Results
EZ Designer is built with the light-hearted designer in mind, someone who has
their images and text ready and woud prefer to select a pre-made layout and fill
it with their content. These layouts can be styled as well for a custom look but
leave all the
layout customization work out.
PRO Designer for Custom Layouts
PRO Designer unleashes all of YZ Designer’s suite of layout tools so that
you can fully harness the power of custom layout design. These tools align
themselves with professional desktop publishing applications so that your staff
goes out into the
world prepared to tackle other complex publishing projects.
YZ Orchestra’s YZ Designer
A mature HTML 5 platform
Customizable, Theme-Driven Designer
No other online Designer gives you this much control!
Use your Own Custom Fonts
Once your yearbook staff determines your yearbook theme, collect theme-related fonts for use in YZ Designer. We will quickly install them into a custom font category inside your fonts menu for use by staff. Any fonts can be installed.
Custom Portrait Treatments
Your staff can fully customize your portrait designs and set them into various regions of a spread. Portrait panels can intermingle with other page components. Once set, we will use your portrait layouts and populate all school staff and student portraits on your behalf.
Theme-related Custom Picture Boxes
YZ Designer is compatible with vector imports. Source your
custom picture box shapes for import. Each imported custom picture
box can house your images just like our pre-populated selection to
emphasize your theme.
Decorators, Patterns & Backgrounds
In addition to our image and vector decorators, patterns and backgrounds, your staff has direct import access to install your theme-related assets.
Working with Layouts in YZ Designer
A comprehensive set, from the simplest to the impressively advanced collection of tools
RESTORE
Never lose your work. Every version of your saved page is automatically stored on our
servers. Any staff member can readily retrieve each saved version of a page.
CUSTOM SELECTION
We’ve created smart selection to ease your working environment with options such
as select: same color, invert selection, just picture boxes, text boxes, decorators,
etc.
SNAP
Our advanced controls, which you can turn on or off as desired, read your object spacing
settings for easy alignment.
A MILLION LAYOUTS+
We have developed a unique auto layout system based on a page grid. What used to take
hours of work is now achieved in fractions of time with incredibly tight controls and
fluid readjustments.
SMART SCALE
Smart scale takes the notion of scaling to warp speed. Intelligent tools engage each
object from various specific points of reference.
DYNAMIC GAPS
An integrated dynamic gap tool allows you to adjust layouts on the fly with
precision while keeping the remainder of your layout intact.
MATCH ATTRIBUTES
Match selected objects’ size and position. You can even match a particular side of
an object to another object’s side.
INLINE EDITING
Image and text tools are integrated to work instantly with your page elements in
real-time. Inline means that when you are working with images placed into your picture
boxes, all image edits are made contextually in place.
TAKE ADVANTAGE
OF DRAFTS
Use drafts for play, variations, theme ideas, and general planning and inspiration.
Drafts are easily portable to your templates library for mass populating into yearbook
pages.
PREFLIGHT &
PROOFING
Smart Preflight analysis tools quickly highlight common errors prior to page submission.
Every spread is available for proofing and review in three quality settings.
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
Pages you save can be processed by our AI Coverage analysis engine to report who is and
is not present in your yearbook.
WORKING ACCROSS
MULTIPLE WINDOWS
Multiple instances of YZ can run at the same time on your computer, allowing you to copy and paste accross them, link external displays, and compare and contrast various documents.
Working with Images in YZ Designer
Our tools make working with your images and original artwork a breeze.
Integrated Media Management
All images reside on our servers so that your staff can work from anywhere.
Further integration is possible with Google Drive accounts linking into your YZ
Designer. Each image is processed to create an optimum application
performance.
Images Report
Our indexing of images used in your yearbook allows you to quickly see
duplicated image uploads or images used more than once on a page. Our
multi-tabbed application support allows you to run two instances of YZ Orchestra
side-by-side to easily resolve
any image
redundancies.
Images Monitor
Each image placed into a page layout is monitored for optimal printing
resolution output as well as completely filling out the picture box which
contains it.
Preflight
Before you submit your page to us, use our Preflight tools to quickly identify
most common issues related to page inconsistencies and errors. Quick diagnostics
point you toward errors with rapid fixes available at your fingertips.
Page & Custom Albums
Each yearbook page comes with its own unique page album. Yearbook staff can
create additional custom albums as needed. Images are easily portrable from one
album into another. Every image is assigned a unique reference number and our
image browser allows
for various other image-related options on the fly.
Portraits
Send over your school rosters and proof the portrait pages once we have notified
you they are ready. The rest is entirely on us so that you can focus your
efforts on the remainder of the yearbook. Our unique cross-matching system
eliminates name misspellings
going to print.
Going Beyond YZ Designer
Tap into your favorite image, vector and layout editing applications
Image Editing Applications
Photoshop, Pixlr, etc.
Anything you create in Photoshop is usable in YZ Designer.
Create your own artwork, patterns, decorators or typography
elements and easily import them onto your yearbook pages.
Should you need
it, your YZ Advocate will train you in working with Photoshop
and YZ Designer.
Vector Editing Applications
Direct Illustrator File Import
Anything you create in Illustrator is usable in YZ Designer.
Create your own custom vector shapes, vector decorators, and
even complete page layouts and easily import them onto your
yearbook pages.
Should
you need it, your YZ Advocate will train you in working with
Illustrator and YZ Designer.
Layout Editing Applications
InDesign - PDF - YZ Designer - Print.
Layouts you create in InDesign can be imported into YZ Designer
as PDFs.
Our AI will work on these PDFs to analyze student
and staff coverage.
This workflow allows you to use a blended
process
to develop your yearbook in both InDesign as well as in the YZ
Designer.
Should you need it, your YZ Advocate will train you
in working with InDesign and YZ Designer.
YZ Designer and InDesign
You can import anything from InDesign into YZ Designer or vice versa.
YZ Designer
Image resolution monitoring
No concern for missing image
links
No embedded fonts issues
Remote, online collaborative
environment
No installation or upgrades
Inline Preflight
diagnostics
InDesign
Advanced typography controls
Advanced Pathfinder
Advanced
tables controls
Advanced clipping paths
At-school, offline
workflows only
No centralized media management
As it relates to yearbook creation, YZ PRO Designer rivals InDesign capabilities and
provides tools which surpass it.
Create your entire yearbook in a matter of a few hours,
then populate elements in minutes.
YZ Designer
removes some of the hassle of InDesign.
