Musing on…School Yearbooks

I recently read a comment by a teenager who said, “All you’re going to do with [a yearbook] is put it on the shelf and never really look at it.” I couldn’t help but smile at that. My own yearbooks have been so used that they are in danger of falling apart (if it wasn’t for the fact that I know that they sold out, I’d get extra copies). But, to be fair, I’ve actually had reason return to these fonts of nostalgia over the years, most often in relation to class reunions.

High school reunions are a curious thing. Most of the members of the class only know about the night(s) when they get to see how old and harried everyone else looks. A few hours of nostalgia, then poof, it’s gone for another five or ten years (usually). They don’t see the year, or years, of effort it takes to actually put one of these things together. I’ve helped instigate my graduating class’ two official reunions, and that means, for a lot of that time, the bibles I lean on are my yearbooks. But this isn’t a reunion post, it’s a yearbook post.

I guess I also have a great fondness for yearbooks because I worked on several of them. While some might think of it as wonkish (yearbook staffs aren’t usually elevated to the status of, say, the football team), I might never have had a career in graphics and publishing had I not had this hands-on experience. So, while that’s good for me, that doesn’t help to explain why yearbooks are anything more than shelf-populators and dust collectors.

The essence of the yearbook is that of an archive of memories…not just of yourself, but of your classmates and your school. In that vein, I think the future value of a yearbook to any given person is directly related to how tied into their school community they were. I’ve got to think that a lot of yearbook workers are like me and remember tons of stuff because of all of the experiences we had gathering the materials that eventually made it into the book. Other groups…teams, various clubs, etc…will also get a kick to have preserved coverage of their own activities—especially in this electronic day and age when putting these materials together is much easier.

But then there are the people who just come to school because they have to, and who don’t have any direct memories in the book except for their class photo. For them, I can see how the yearbook is easily thought of as an unnecessary expense.

One aspect of how enthusiastic any particular group of classes might be in getting yearbooks is how all of this information is presented…i.e. the design. I’ve seen a lot of yearbooks in my time, and I’ve got to say that most are pretty lifeless. Why? Because they were built to the handful of standards that are generally known to produce awards. My high school yearbook staffs chose instead not to worry about any of that; we wanted to make fun yearbooks. And, though our pre-computer high school abilities were somewhat limited, I’d like to think that we came up with some books that our classmates have enjoyed thumbing through.

On the other hand, the modern yearbook is almost a case study in sterile cookie-cutter design. Schools get templates from yearbook companies, and they build the books to those standard templates. There isn’t a lot of creativity, and the work can be done by the untrained high school students without much fuss. Where’s the passion? Adolescence is supposed to be a time of passion, and nowhere can that be expressed for the ages better than in yearbooks. But now, despite all of these modern tools, today’s yearbooks are lifeless pages doomed to take up space on shelves until they are eventually packed away and/or lost.

Today, there is a push on for the class-participation yearbook via the web. Photos, stories, songs, video, and more all get uploaded by the students in a less antiquated version of the ol’ picture book. While I like the concept, I am very concerned about the durability of this effort. Companies go out of business. Technologies change. That web sites or CD/DVDs that preserves those high school memories are very likely to be inaccessible years down the road. But the books will endure. (Plus, it’s not easy to scrawl out some end-of-year platitude on one of the non-book methods…at least, not so that it seems personal.)

Today, with all of those years of experience behind me and all of this technology in front of me, it would be easy to put together a yearbook in a week or so (given a diligent staff of about five or six). If you want a creative book, give me a few days more, or better yet a week, and you’ll have something unique…quite possibly even something that people would want to not only buy, but look at ten or twenty or fifty years down the road. With the tools now available, the great thing is that the buyers don’t have to make their purchase completely blind. Some in-progress pages could be posted on the school’s web site to encourage sales. Then extras, like including a CD or DVD, could enhance the experience without detracting from the core permanence of the archive (though these frills cost money).

To answer that teenager quoted at the beginning of this story, I have to say that if you didn’t participate or spectate in your school’s community, and especially if your school makes a cookie-cutter yearbook, then maybe getting one isn’t the right choice. But, if instead you become part of the solution and try to put some student life into the book (or maybe creating your own not-libelous underground version), then maybe you’d have a reason to buy one. Who knows…maybe twenty-five years from now your nephew will get a kick out of seeing how goofy you and your friends were in school. I know I did when I found my aunt’s old high school yearbooks. Definitely an MC-priceless moment.