I believe that the most important part of the Yearbook is the Seniors. While the mission statement of a Yearbook is to preserve memories, its purpose is to celebrate the most iconic year in the Seniors lives.
YearBoxx celebrates the Seniors in three places. Firstly, there is a traditional Senior Portrait Section, which looks very much like a classic Senior Section in a print Yearbook. The Seniors are presented in rows of three. What makes this section quite different from a print book, however, is when you touch a portrait, it explodes onto the full screen!
In most print Yearbooks, the size of a Senior portrait is 1 inch by 1 ½ inches. Before enlarging a portrait in the Senior Portrait Section in YearBoxx, the photographs are the same size. However, a simple touch brings them up to nearly 5 inches by 3 inches on the larger phones we all are gravitating towards. And, of course, you can zoom in on them also. Why not take a screenshot and send it off to family and friends?
From my perspective, this is one of the most exciting things about a YearBoxx, enlarging a Senior Portrait and then scrolling through the Senior Class, enjoying an incredible look at every one.
The second place where the Seniors are celebrated is in the Senior Directory. Here, the images are larger and searchable.
The third place to celebrate Seniors is within the Senior Directory by choosing the ‘Visit MY PAGE’ icon. This is where digital truly shines. I will assume that if you are reading my blog (and thank you for that!) you have already seen a Senior My Page. The Portrait Picture is now substantially enlarged and there is more information on the page than any Yearbook that doesn’t give Seniors their own full page. Only a handful of my private schools can afford to do that in their print books. But those pages are not interactive!
The YearBoxx MY PAGE is like their own personal portal in the yearbook. It’s almost like having their own personal yearbook! Here, they can have a quote, a list of their Activities, and their Future Plans and include a Senior Write-up, where they can reminisce about their High School experience, thank family, friends, and teachers for their support, and let everyone know what a fantastic year they had.
Almost as exciting as the above is that each Senior can add photographs to their MY PAGE for the rest of their lives! How fun will it be, five, ten, twenty years after Graduation to see how your Classmates currently look? Pictures tell a story and this is a wonderful way to tell your story to the Class!
There are times when I get a little frustrated that I can’t have an Idiom Yearbook from my Class of 1972. I see most of my Classmates once every five years at our reunions. And while it is so much fun to see them, I would love to see more of them throughout the year. While it may be difficult for the younger amongst you to imagine being out of High School for nearly 50 years, I can let you all know that the memories just get more precious as you grow. A YearBoxx preserves those specific memories in a way that no other document ever has.
Something else that is so special in on the My Page is the opportunity to reach out to your Classmates through their Social Media connections. Every Senior can include, on their MY PAGE, their cell phone number, their email address, and whatever Social Media addresses they would like. Of course, it will always be up to each individual Senior as to how much information, if any, they would like to include in their Questionnaire. A YearBoxx keeps Classes connected.
I will end my blog about how important I feel the Senior Section is with this little industry inside story. All of us Yearbook Representatives are always anxious about the quality of the printing in our Yearbooks. We all get a copy of each book before it is delivered to the school and the first thing we do is check the print quality. Many years ago, all the print yearbook companies had good-quality jobs or not-so-good-quality jobs. For the past seven or eight years, quality has been pretty much amazing for all the companies thanks to technical advances in printing presses. However, even the best printed Senior Portrait will NEVER look as good as a backlit Portrait on a cellphone! I remember seeing the first Senior Portrait on the first demos my software team gave me of YearBoxx, I was blown away. The color was perfect, the size was enormous to me and the backlit image was brilliant.
Without Seniors, you don’t have a yearbook. YearBoxx celebrates seniors in a way that has never before been possible!
