Hello
I have not set foot in a high school in 25 years and have no school-age children. Do high schools still issue annual yearbooks? Or have websites, Facebook, etc replaced bound volumes?
If yearbooks still exist, have they changed much? For most of the twentieth century, the format was very stable across time and did not vary much from one place to another - at least in the U.S.
Yes, around here they do.
FYI, here is the website for Jostens, a company that prints yearbooks for schools (as well as supplying class rings, graduation gowns, and other stuff).
My wife is a high school teacher. They still make traditional yearbooks here. Sometimes they come with a last minute DVD with bonus material. But the yearbooks themselves haven’t changed and look the same as ones from 20 or 40 years ago basically.
In high school back in the early 1990’s I took photos for our yearbook with a 35mm film camera. Today they use digital cameras, of course.
I occasionally sub for the yearbook class, where the students are putting it together. What’s changed are that, first, the page layout is all done on computers now. And second, not only are the cameras digital, they might not even bother with supplying cameras at all: Cell phone cameras are now mostly up to the task, and so the yearbook students just use their phones.
But the final product still looks much the same as it always has, with teenagers making goofy poses in the pictures and writing corny captions full of in-jokes.
Yes, and the companies that print the yearbooks push them hard. I’m currently getting weekly emails reminding me that I haven’t purchased my daughter’s yearbook yet and they “can’t guarantee you’ll get one if you don’t order soon!” And of course, for a slightly exorbitant fee I can get her name and graduation year engraved on her personal copy. Not to mention the fact that I can buy an ad congratulating her on graduating.
Yes, my kids had them and they’re recent grads. They’re also very expensive now.
In the Graphic Design classes that I’ve taught (college and post-grad), we’ve often gotten students who worked on their high school yearbook and loved it. So I hope they survive.
It’s a little weird that schools are still putting out physical yearbooks. This generation is one that doesn’t own physical media (no CDs, DVDs or books). Even their photos are mostly digital. So a printed yearbooks is something of an anachronism. They could, I suppose, instead just set up a website or a Facebook page with the same content. But that wouldn’t make any money for Jostens and its competitors. So I wonder if they push the advantages of an old-fashioned yearbook when selling the concept to kids. After all, if you put the stuff on Facebook, is it going to be there ten or twenty years from now? Will Facebook even still be around?
It’s clearly variable, because I heard from a patron just today that his former high school had not published a physical yearbook in several years. (He was contacting them to try to buy a copy of the yearbook from his senior year.)
Makes sense to me. Signing a yearbook is different from posting on a page. And I have mine from 50 years ago - no digital formats today are likely to be around in 50 years, and who is going to convert yearbooks from small schools?
You can scan a paper year book. A yearbook on DecTape (a format from less than 50 years ago) not so much.