Recently, I had the occasion to look at my old yearbooks from elementary, middle, and high school, and I can’t believe how different they were from what we make now. I’m going to age myself, but in order to share how yearbooks have evolved since I was in school, I have to. I started elementary school in the mid-1970s, so that means I am a child of the 80s – I was in middle and high school throughout the 80s.
The yearbooks were so basic – everything was in black and white: all photos, all text, and everything was in the same font. No theme, no style, just content.
My elementary and middle school yearbooks had paper covers with printing in black ink on colored paper and bound with simple staples – some of my pages were falling out because of such simple binding. The photos inside were all black and white; the portrait pages were all spread out with names along the side. I wonder who was responsible for making those yearbooks? The office staff or secretaries—because we didn’t have a yearbook club or class in those grades.
My high school yearbooks were hardcover, and the covers got nicer with each year, eventually with embossing. The photos were all in black and white, low quality, from a distance, and honestly, not great at making sure you could see faces. The font was all the same, but sometimes bigger to denote headings. The writing was not great or concise, and sometimes it was clearly written to fill space, so it was repetitive, not exactly to describe or inform.
Looking back now, I’m amazed at what was accomplished without computers or when we were just at the beginning of using computers for “word processing.” There was no spell check. Layouts were done by hand, printed, and taped or glued onto a large page, making it legible and rearranging until it all fit. Assembling a yearbook took months and months, and the pages were rearranged and reordered dozens of times. The index was done by hand by a group of students, flipping back and forth to find the names and write down the pages those students were on.
And deadlines—our yearbooks covered a calendar year, January through December, rather than the school year. This meant we received them at the end of the school year, so everything had to be turned in by December to ensure printing and delivery on time! Because of this format, I actually have five high school yearbooks instead of four, with portions of each grade split across different books. Our yearbook staff was filled with students from all four grades and given different jobs and responsibilities. Senior editors had worked their way up from freshman year as staff to become the leaders of the yearbook. And with the yearbook being calendar-year based rather than school-year based, the staff wasn’t the same for the whole book—it changed as students graduated or new members joined mid-production!
So, looking back and judging those old yearbooks with today’s eyes isn’t fair, and it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate what it took to create a lasting yearbook. Seeing all the developments in how we make yearbooks today, it is remarkable what we did when we didn’t have the equipment—cameras, computers, the software, the internet, the fonts, the knowledge and training—and things are still developing: online software and AI, cellphone cameras, etc. As rudimentary as those old yearbooks may seem, they’re still something I appreciate as a record of the time and my years, and I enjoy looking back at them with fondness, nostalgia, and appreciation.
Wow! I never heard of the yearbooks going half years like that!
We didn’t have yearbooks when I was in elementary school (I’m the same age bracket as you), but started in Jr. High. So we didn’t have to worry about who was making them. Maybe that’s why we didn’t have them, none of the parents wanted to do it back then, lol. Our yearbooks were softcover in jr. high and hardcover in high school, but they went through the school year just like we do now. We just got them back in the fall, which is how they do it now, I think. I do elementary yearbooks, so I’m not sure how the high school does theirs.
I agree, today’s yearbooks are SO much better than back then!
I think there are benefits to distribution at the end of the year and in the Fall/end of Summer. I am glad I had yearbooks at the end of the school year to pass around and get autographs and messages – those are so fun to go back and read through, (My best friend wrote her message across the top of like 10 pages! A boy I had a crush on wrote a sweet, “I always liked you” message that was buried in the index that I didn’t even find until a few days later), but the deadlines for submitting mean there are lots of things that aren’t included. A distribution at the end of the summer or beginning of the school year for us means none of those personal messages, teachers’ notes Keep In Touch messages with phone numbers, last year’s seniors have left for college or next phase of their lives (“moved on” with life and sometimes don’t ever pick them up or send a sibling or parent to do it), but you will see all the fun things included from the last few months of school, including graduation.
As a yearbook creator, I mostly made elementary yearbooks and I would try to get photos included as close to the end of the year as possible. I was fortunate enough to get a year where my publisher gave me a deadline that was the first week of MAY and a couple extra pages that needed filled, so I filled it with one of the school’s fun activities with a Civil War Reenactment group that always came out that week – never before had I been able to add that to the yearbooks! Other publishers required me to turn in my pages/book by Mid March, but with the one I worked the most with, Entourage, I was able to finish near the end of April! That’s a lot of content.
I know high school is different, but I do cherish the autographs and glad I had a book in hand at the end of each year – my kids get their yearbooks in August, so no messages or signatures in there.