T H EDesign Bible

One spread, described all the way down, so you can hold your page next to it and see what is missing.

Picture the varsity soccer spread.

The draft says: mode HOUSE, look CLASSIC, transition action to action. Chair signed it. Sensei signed it.

Left page. One dominant photo, the striker mid-kick, filling two thirds of the page. The photo is clean, no filter (Treatment A in Photos). It has a black ruled border and it bleeds off the top edge. That is the only bleed on the spread.

Top left corner of the dominant: a yellow caption box, two sentences, the constant text family.

Across the gutter: the headline, lettered as art in one display face, one hard drop shadow, nothing important inside 0.375 in of the spine.

Right page. A six-panel grid. Gutters all 3/16 in. The top row is three frames of one goal, left to right: the pass, the shot, the net. The bottom row is a wide of the bench, a medium of the keeper, a close of a muddy boot. Wide, medium, close. All three shot sizes are on the page.

One inset sits in the corner of the dominant: the scoreboard.

Every panel has a caption in the same corner, same size, same family.

Color: four colors off the 25/50/100 grid plus black. Team color is the hero. Paper texture at 25% on the flats only. No dots on anyone’s face, no dots under any word.

Bottom: folio and photo credits in the constant family. Every name checked twice, preferred names used.

Turn it greyscale at 25% from arm’s length. Everything still reads.

Hold your spread next to that one. Whatever is missing is your note.

Every Olympian gets a name and a look, picked by the staff, and then it is the law for 276 pages. This year it is a comic book.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: three sentences, out loud, repeatable. What the issue is, what it feels like to hold, what the reader is supposed to think is happening. If you cannot say it to a sophomore in the hallway without them going "huh," it is not done yet.

What it is not. It is not a costume. The comic is a lens on a real year at a real school, and the year is the part that matters. Nobody opens a yearbook in 2046 to admire the halftone. They open it to find themselves.

So the premise never gets to win an argument with the content. If a treatment makes a photo harder to read, a name harder to find, or a moment smaller than it was, the treatment loses.

Every time.

You do not pick a font. You pick a mode, and inside HOUSE you pick a look. Both come with their type, color and panel behavior already decided.

This is how actual comics work. One issue carries house ads, a text page in the back and a homage spread, and they share almost nothing except the furniture. It reads as one book anyway, because the variation is chosen from a list instead of invented on the spot.

The four modes.

HOUSE is the default and most of the book lives here. If you are not sure, you are in House.

PULP AD is for house ads and interstitials. Full period treatment, screaming headline, too many exclamation points, the works. This is where the theme gets to be as loud as it wants, because it is the one ad we own end to end.

MANGA is for the content that earns it. Anime club, esports, martial arts.

TEXT PAGE is editorial: features, reviews, interviews. No panels. That is the whole tell.

The three HOUSE looks. HOUSE used to mean “nothing in particular,” and nothing in particular is what we were getting. Now a HOUSE spread also names its look.

CLASSIC is the 80s newsstand comic. Black brush line, flat color off the 64-color grid, six-panel grid with one splash, yellow caption boxes, loud headlines. Earnest, big, a little corny on purpose. Most of the book. Pull up Uncanny X-Men #141 (1981) or Amazing Spider-Man #252 (1984).

GRIT is the 1986 turn. Strict grid (nine or sixteen panels), secondary palette (purple, orange, olive, mustard), no sound effects, no motion lines, small even type, heavy black. Fewer words, not more. Watchmen (1986) and The Dark Knight Returns (1986). For rivalry games, playoffs, the senior sendoff. Never for a bake sale.

TOON is big shapes and clean line. Flat color plus one shadow color per object, strong silhouettes, rounded or missing borders, faces over detail. Batman: The Animated Series style guides (1992), Calvin and Hobbes (1985 to 1995), Bone (1991). For candids, clubs, pets, freshmen, anything where faces and jokes carry the page. This is the look that keeps the book from trying too hard.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the display kit, palette and border style for each look (CLASSIC, GRIT, TOON) and each mode (PULP AD, MANGA, TEXT PAGE). The study page has the references: What makes a comic a comic.

One mode, one look per spread. Two modes on one spread is a ransom note. Two looks is a ransom note with better handwriting.

The content earns the mode and the look. Manga because it is the anime club, not because you like manga. GRIT because the game mattered, not because black looks cool. A look you picked for your own reasons is a costume, and see the section above.

One mode spread per section, approved at draft. If every spread is special then none of them are, and your section reads like somebody shuffled it. Looks are not limited the same way: a section can be all CLASSIC with one TOON spread and one GRIT spread, as long as each one earned it.

Your draft names its mode and its look. Your chair’s signature is partly them agreeing the spread earned both. That is a much better conversation than arguing about a font.

About manga and reading direction. Manga reads right to left. This book does not, and flipping one spread quietly breaks the reader for the next three. So manga mode borrows the grammar, screentone and speed lines and panel shape and vertical sound effects, and still reads left to right like everything else.

With exactly one exception. Somewhere in this book there is a single page printed right to left, with the stop sign and the “you’re reading it wrong, turn around” note, exactly like the back of a translated volume. One. It is a joke that only works once and only works if the rest of the book is disciplined.

Find it.

The constants never change. One text family, roman and italic and bold, doing body copy, captions, credits and the folio.

It is the same family inside a manga spread, inside a pulp ad, inside the senior section. It does not get a vacation. This is the least interesting decision in the Design Bible and the one that does the most work, because the reason three hundred wildly different pages feel like one object is that the small type never moved.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the text family, and the sizes and leading for body, caption and folio.

Then three per spread, on top of the constants. Three display faces, maximum, from your mode's kit. The constants do not count against the three, because otherwise you spend your whole budget before you draw anything.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the display kit for each of the four modes.

A lettering face is never a body face. Comic lettering is built to be read at four words a time, in a balloon, at size. Set a paragraph in it and you have made something nobody will read and everybody will pretend they did.

Lettering is a design element, not a font. Real comic lettering was drawn by hand, all caps, slightly uneven. A computer font set in perfect rows looks fake, so headlines and balloons get set as art with a little room to breathe, never justified into a block.

Caption boxes are yellow or white. Black border, one per panel, top left corner, inside the panel. Nothing else.

Sound effects are drawn as art. One per spread, maximum, and only on CLASSIC, TOON and MANGA. GRIT has none.

Bold inside a balloon is one or two words, never a sentence.

Three is a ceiling, not a target. Most good spreads use two.

Type inside art is still type. It gets spellchecked before it gets flattened, and a name inside a rasterized layer is a name nobody can fix later.

The Walsworth problem. Walsworth's editor does not have Adobe Fonts and never will. So display type gets set in Photoshop or Illustrator and placed as art, at spec, every time. Do not try to retype it in Walsworth and expect it to match. It will not, and the version that ships is whichever one you forgot about.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the export settings for placed type.

The activation trap. Fonts follow your Adobe account, not the computer. Open your PSD on a machine somebody else is signed into and the type can vanish without asking you first. Check it before you call a page done, not during checkpoint week.

A monitor is a lamp and a press is not. Everything in this section exists because of that one sentence.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the palette, as CMYK builds. Not screen names, not hex. A build or it does not exist.

The 64-color grid. Comic colorists in the 80s had no color picker. Cyan, magenta and yellow each came in four steps (0, 25, 50 and 100 percent), which makes 64 colors, plus black line on top. Every CLASSIC and TOON color sits on that grid. If you needed a slider to find it, it is not a comic color.

Rich black is 50C 40M 40Y 100K. Total ink under 300%. Never the Registration swatch, which is not a color, it is an instruction to put every ink on the paper at once and it will smear.

One coloring style per spread.

Flat 64 (CLASSIC): grid colors, shadows are a darker step of the same hue, not a different hue.

Baxter (CLASSIC, openers): same grid, white paper, full strength. Looks plastic and bright. New Teen Titans (1984).

Secondaries (GRIT): purple, orange, green, mustard. Red saved for one thing. Watchmen. The fastest way to make a spread feel older than it is.

Black and white plus one (GRIT or TOON, features only): everything grey except one color that means something. Sin City (1991), TMNT #1 (1984). Dangerous with photos, lethal with portraits.

Screentone (MANGA): grey dot and line patterns, no color at all except the folio.

Two-value cel (TOON): flat base plus one shadow color per object, hard edge.

Painted (section covers only, and only if someone can actually paint).

Banned everywhere: soft gradients, lens flares, blurred drop shadows, glow layer styles, rainbow anything. Those are 1996 and they are exactly what “generic” looks like. The one gradient allowed in the whole book is chrome on a title logo.

Halftone and ben-day dots are the signature of the whole theme, and they are also the fastest way to make a page unreadable.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: allowed dot sizes and where dots are permitted.

Never under body copy. Never under a caption. Never under a name. Never on a face. The dots go behind art and into flats, small and fine, not the giant pop-art dots from the 60s Batman show. The moment somebody has to work to read a word, the dots lost.

Dark on dark is the recurring killer and it always looks fine on the screen. It always looks fine in Walsworth too. Then it arrives on paper and your caption is simply gone. Convert the spread to greyscale and look at it at 25% from arm’s length. Anything that disappears there disappears in the book.

Your neon comes back dusty. That is not a mistake anybody made, it is four inks doing their best.

Know it now, not in March.

Columns, gutters, module, margins, spine allowance, drawn once and locked in the BASE TEMPLATE PSD.

Until the BASE TEMPLATE ships, two numbers are already law: gutters between panels are 3/16 in, all the same width on a spread, and nothing that matters sits inside 0.375 in of the spine.

A panel is a module or a group of modules, never a freehand box somebody dragged. Uneven gutters are the fastest tell of a beginner, and the grid is how you never have them.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the column count, module size, margins and spine allowance, once the BASE TEMPLATE is cut.

Sequence gets panels. Collections do not. A panel is a camera shot, so think like a director, not a scrapbooker.

Three shot sizes on every spread. Wide (where are we), medium (who is here), close (what do they feel). A spread of all mediums is the single most common reason a layout looks flat.

One dominant. One panel owns the spread, at least a third of it. Everything else supports it. This is the yearbook rule and the splash page rule. Same rule, two names.

The eye path is a Z. Top left to bottom right. Put the dominant at the start or the end of the Z, never dead center where it blocks the path. Action in a photo points into the spread, not off the edge.

Gutters: 3/16 in, all the same. Drawn in the template, never eyeballed.

Borders follow the look. Hand-ruled black for CLASSIC. Thin and even for GRIT. Rounded or missing for TOON. Irregular and tilted for MANGA action. A tilted panel means something happened. On a calm spread, tilt zero panels.

One bleed per spread, maximum. Two is a poster. Zero is fine.

Breaking the border is emphasis. A subject crossing out of its panel, once a spread, when it is earned.

Insets go in the corners of the dominant. A small panel on top of the big one for the detail: the hands, the scoreboard, the shoe. Great for sports.

Captions: one per panel, top left, inside the panel, yellow or white. Photo credits go in the gutter or the folio line, never floating inside art.

Pacing. More, smaller panels read faster. One big panel is a held breath. If a spread feels rushed, it has too many panels, not too few photos.

The content still wins. If a panel treatment makes a face smaller than the moment was, cut the treatment, not the face.

Two panels next to each other make a sentence. There are six ways to write it (Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, 1993), and five of them map straight onto yearbook spreads.

Moment to moment. Tiny steps in time: the kick, the kick landing. Slow and cinematic. One big play, broken into three frames.

Action to action. One subject, one action per panel: wind-up, throw, catch. The default for sports and performances. Most spreads are mostly this.

Subject to subject. Same scene, different people: the pitcher, the batter, the crowd. This is how a crowd shot and a close-up become one moment instead of two photos.

Scene to scene. Jumps in time or place: morning practice, afternoon game, bus home. A caption carries the jump (“SIX HOURS LATER”). This is the “day in the life” spread.

Aspect to aspect. No time passes. The camera wanders the mood: the empty gym, the taped ankle, the whistle, the rain. Manga’s signature move, almost never used in yearbooks. It is how you make an atmosphere spread (homecoming night, last day of school) instead of a collage.

Non-sequitur. No relationship between the panels. In a comic it is an art move. In a yearbook it is a mistake. Banned.

The rule: the draft names the transition. A sequence spread runs mostly one type. A collection spread (club group shots) has no transitions, because collections do not get panels.

Pick the transition before you pick the photos.

It tells you which photos you are missing.

A photo in a comic yearbook is not a photo with a filter on it. It is a photo placed in a comic. Three legal treatments, in the order they should appear.

Treatment A: clean photo in a panel. 80% of the book. The photo is untouched. The comic happens around it: ink border, gutter, caption box, lettered headline. This is what Walsworth prints best and what parents want to see. The theme lives in the frame, not on the face.

Treatment B: ink and flats. A photo turned into line art plus flat color. Openers, dominants, one feature portrait per section. It is a real Photoshop build with its own guide and practice job: INK AND FLATS. Faces stay recognizable or the spread fails, whatever it looks like.

Treatment C: halftone and paper, backgrounds only. Fine dots and newsprint texture on color fields and background art. Masked off every face and every word. Never on a portrait, never under type.

Cutouts are legal, floating is not. A subject cut out of its background and placed on flat color is a comic move (every cover does it). The cut has to be clean and the subject needs a black ink outline, 3 to 5 px at print size, so it sits in the world. A soft-edged cutout floating over a gradient is the exact “generic” look we are killing.

Banned: Filter Gallery > Poster Edges or Cutout used straight, any one-click “comic” action, phone app filters, pop-art dots over a face, blurred drop shadows on photos, white glow outlines around cutouts.

If it took one click, it looks like it took one click.

Every section opener is an issue cover, and nothing inside a section gets cover treatment.

The fixed anatomy. A cover is a form. Leave a piece off and it is a poster.

Corner box, top left: a character head (the section’s mascot or a student), the issue number (the section number) and a price.

Logo band across the top: THE OLYMPIAN in the masthead lockup, the section title underneath as the issue title.

A seal, top right, where the Comics Code stamp sat. Ours is the school seal or the year.

A barcode box, bottom left, carrying the page range of the section.

At least one blurb in a burst: “STILL ONLY 60¢!”, “THE SENSES-SHATTERING CONCLUSION!” The blurb is a real design job. A cover with no copy is a 90s cover and we are not doing those.

One image, a cutout with a black ink outline over flat color, or an ink-and-flats conversion. Never a clean photo. Covers are the one place the treatment goes first.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the masthead lockup, the corner box template, the price, the seal, and the burst shapes, as placeable art.

Seven designers, one anatomy, one title.

That is the whole point of a form.

The slow page is a design, not a leftover. The absence of panels is how the reader knows to slow down without being told.

The anatomy. A drop cap on the first paragraph. One dominant element, a photo or a pull quote, never both. A pull quote in the display face at least three times body size. A byline with a small headshot. Real white space, at least a quarter of the page empty. Two columns, maximum. Body stays in the constant family.

Two legal flavors.

The Bulletins page: chatty, short items, headshots in circles, a headline strip. Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins and DC’s Meanwhile column. Staff page, letters page, Sensei’s Soapbox.

The document page: a prop. A typed memo, a newspaper clipping, a letter, a page from a 1986 yearbook. Watchmen’s back matter is the reference. This is the one that makes people stop and read, and it costs almost nothing to build in Canva.

Word count is on the draft. Over 400 words a page and it needs a second pull quote or it needs cutting. Nobody reads 600 words in a yearbook, and that includes the person who wrote them.

Paid business ads get no theme inside the frame. Senior ads get theme in the border only. House ads go full pulp.

Paid ads. The business sent art; the business gets its art, printed clean, inside a plain black frame. Ask for vector at the sale, not in March.

Senior ads. The family’s photos and words, untouched. The theme is a border, chosen from the border kit, and nothing else.

House ads (PULP AD mode). The anatomy: a headline that yells, a burst with the offer, illustrated or ink-and-flats art (never a clean photo), a dotted-border coupon or order form with a scissors icon, tiny legal copy at the bottom, one accent color plus black. Three of those missing and it is a flyer.

House ads we are actually building:

Club recruitment as a mail-order coupon (“JOIN TODAY! No experience necessary!”).

The index as a subscription page.

The page facing each section cover as a NEXT ISSUE teaser.

The staff page as Bullpen Bulletins, with a Sensei’s Soapbox.

A NO-PRIZE box for the people who caught errors in proofs.

Senior quotes as a letters page, with each sender’s “address” being their plans.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the border kit for senior ads, the frame spec for paid ads, and the burst and coupon shapes for house ads.

Portraits, index, folios, senior ads, and anything a parent reads for information.

Portraits: clean photos, clean grid, names in the constant family. No dots, no borders in a look, no captions in balloons.

Index: it can be dressed as a subscription page, but every name and page number is plain type at full size.

Folios: same place, same size, every page.

Senior ads: border only.

Anything information-bearing: schedules, rosters, scores, credits. Plain.

The failure mode, named out loud: a parent opens the book in April to find their kid and cannot read the name, because somebody put a halftone under it. That is the whole reason this section exists.

The theme is a lens on the year.

The year is the part that matters.

Walsworth is not where you design. It is where you assemble and ship.

Coming with v2: starter PSD, naming, versioning, where the layered master lives, proof before you flatten, and what stays Walsworth's job. Same rule as RAW and JPEG, new object.

What a proofer checks, in the order they check it. Every line is in or out. One out and the spread goes back.

☐ One mode. The draft names it, the chair signed it, and nothing from a second mode snuck in.

☐ One look, named on the draft. HOUSE spreads say CLASSIC, GRIT or TOON, and the whole spread agrees with it.

☐ One transition, named on the draft. Sequence spreads run mostly one type. Collections have no panels.

☐ The constants held. Body, captions, credits and folio are all in the one text family. Nothing in a lettering face runs longer than a balloon.

☐ Three display faces, max. Count them. The constants do not count.

☐ Every word spellchecked, names twice. Including the type you flattened into art, because nobody can fix a name inside a rasterized layer.

☐ Display type placed as art. Set in Photoshop or Illustrator, not retyped in Walsworth.

☐ Fonts survive another login. Open the file on a machine somebody else is signed into. If the type moved, it is not done.

☐ CMYK builds only. Rich black is 50C 40M 40Y 100K, total ink under 300%. The Registration swatch appears nowhere.

☐ Three shot sizes, one dominant, one bleed max. Gutters 3/16 in and all the same.

☐ Every photo is Treatment A, B or C. No one-click filter, no floating soft cutout, every face recognizable.

☐ No dots under words. Not under body copy, not under a caption, not under a name.

☐ Greyscale at 25%, arm’s length. Anything that disappears there disappears on paper.

☐ 300 dpi at print size. Line art 800. Real pixels, not a number typed into a box.

☐ Clear of the spine. Nothing that matters inside 0.375 in of the gutter. Bleed runs 0.125 in past trim.

☐ The content won. Every photo reads, every name is findable, every moment is as big as it was. If the treatment made any of those smaller, the treatment loses.

Grid modules and folio position join this list when the BASE TEMPLATE locks.

Once the Design Bible is built, Dojo-kun runs this same list on every spread you post.

One person edits this page. A document owned by "Design" is owned by nobody, and a rule six people can change is not a rule.

DESIGN FILLS THIS: the owner's name plus a backup. Year 2, Design.

It freezes during build and proof. It opens during workshop week. That is the deal. You cannot be asked to build against something that moved on Tuesday, and the Design Bible cannot stay correct all year if nobody is allowed to touch it.

There is one copy and it is this page. No PDF going around, no version in somebody's Drive, no screenshot in a DM. The second there are two copies there is no Design Bible, there is just whichever one you happened to open. Templates carry the version number in the filename so a stale one tells on itself.

Broke a rule and you were right? That is a change request, not a violation. Log it, bring it to workshop week, argue for it. The drift log is how this document stays honest, and a guide nobody is allowed to argue with is a guide everybody quietly stops reading around February.

What is not in here: who owes what page, when it is due, and anything about your grade. The Design Bible is how a page looks. The syllabus is everything else. The day this turns into a second syllabus is the day nobody opens either one.