The first bound ‘yearbook’ was introduced in 1806 to the seniors of Yale University. I put the word – yearbook – in quotes because it was more of a journal. Photography had not been invented yet so there were no senior portraits, no club, or sports pictures… there was text and printed silhouettes of the graduates.
In the middle 1800’s, an American photographer named George Warren move from daguerreotype to a new photographic technology that used a single negative that could produce multiple images, redefining the print industry and opening the door to the modern-day yearbook.
In 1860, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, printed one of the first ‘modern’ yearbooks. One hundred and twenty-four seniors (all male) received their yearbooks and excitedly flipped through the pages, reading the stories, and enjoying the limited number of photographs (back in the day, because photographs requited so much ink, there was an additional charge for each one).
In 2024, I delivered 710 yearbooks to both male and female students at Packer Collegiate School in Brooklyn, NY. They excitedly flipped through the pages, read the stories, and enjoyed the photographs. The yearbook experience has not changed in over one hundred and sixty years!
Generation Z students don’t what to flip through pages… they want to swipe though pages… on their cellphone. They want everything that can be on their phone to be on their phone, including their yearbook.
Interestingly, digital yearbooks have actually been around for a decade. Introduced by Balfour Publishing (the company I worked with for decades) produced the first digital yearbook. I was so excited! A yearbook you could access on your phone, it seemed so Next Generation to me and I couldn’t wait to introduce it to my schools.
It turned out that I was the only one who was excited about a digital yearbook. I couldn’t give it away. How could I have been so wrong?
To answer that question, I need to explain exactly what a ‘digital’ yearbook was a decade back. It was a PDF of the print yearbook, and here is why it all went wrong. Most yearbooks are 8 ½ by 11 inches in size. If you open such a yearbook, you are looking at a double page spread, the way we read and look at printed books, a size of 17 by 11 inches.
Now, image taking those 17 by 11 inches and crunching it down to the size of a cellphone, which is around 6.29 inches by 3.11 inches. For a cellphone, that is huge. For a yearbook, this is disturbingly tiny. Viewing a single page, let alone a double page spread, is soul wrenchingly maddening. Imagine how much scrolling and pinching is needed to just enlarge a picture just enough to recognize who is in it (I actually wore off the fingerprint on my left index finger doing just that!)?
And to top it all off, the company needs to do a PRINT yearbook first! This PDF is nothing more than a COPY of the print yearbook shrunk down to size.
Navigating such a yearbook is horrible. Trying to find a senior is cruelly difficult. The experience is just no fun.
Almost every yearbook company has realized that they need some kind of a digital product in this digital age. They have also realized that if they offer a true digital yearbook, oh, kinda like YearBoxx, they will, as stated, cannibalize their print yearbook sales. So, they have been forced into offering something digital, like the mentioned PDF yearbook or will offer to store unused pictures online for the school, QR codes or… well there a number of not very useful ‘digital’ ideas so they can pretend to be offering a ‘Digital Yearbook.’ They probably should focus on what they do well, printing yearbooks.
Well, years later, my customers began asking me for a real digital solution for their yearbooks. They were Gen Z students, the first generation to be born digitally native. I did a dive into the digital yearbook world to see if there was something better than the unfortunate PDF yearbook available… there wasn’t!
This didn’t make sense to me. The world had gone digital… in a really big way. Most of the print world had already migrated to the digital format. The New York Times, the most traditional newspaper in the country, went digital. Books, newspapers, magazines all made went digital in one way or another.
So, with no solution, I decided I would create a proper digital yearbook. How hard could that be? The answer… REALLY HARD!
Designing a true, digital NEXT GENERATION yearbook was a breeze. With my decades in the industry and my fascination with technology, it was exciting, fun, and easy to create YearBoxx. I talked with students, yearbook advisors and principals to get their vision of what a digital yearbook should be. Not surprisingly, VIDEO was a big request. Customization and personalization were high on the list of wants. Better pricing was demanded. The list was extensive and easy to accommodate.
Then, I interviewed myself to find out what I wanted in a Next Generation yearbook. Having been out of high school for… well, I’m just going to say – decades… and decades… and decades… and decades… and most of another decade, I had an excellent perspective of what I wanted in a yearbook, of what memories I needed and what features I thought would be cool.
I’ll assume you have been through our website and know what has ultimately been created so I won’t bore you with those details, but features like the MY PAGE and the Future Events Section really excited me. The ability to see my friend’s video signatures (there is also a text signature option) thrilled me to no end. Until you have been out of school for at least a few years, you will not really grasp how fantastic it is to see your friends and classmates moving, speaking, and being animated, both in their video signature as well as in videos throughout YearBoxx.
I feel really good about offering students such a relevant yearbook option!
