Yearbook Collection

Global awareness, current events, and popular culture continued to impact how students viewed themselves in relation to their friends, social groups, and community. Photography continued to be the primary medium for students to capture their experiences and express their personalities.

Changes in technology defined much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and are evident in everything from curriculum content to the design and layout of the yearbooks. Technology classes became standard as schools worked to keep pace with preparing their students for the future. In the 1990s, students engaged in word processing courses, and schools incorporated computer programs into other subjects like science and English. By the turn of the century, information literacy lessons were popular. Yearbook editors used popular computer-generated fonts and graphics.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, senior photos are almost always in color; occasionally, faculty and administration photographs are in color.

Around the early 2000s, many high school yearbooks were printed entirely in color.

Depending on the school, large sections of pictures and content were still printed in black and white. Most schools would divide the use of color printing, prioritizing students, senior moments and significant events, and faculty and staff.

For schools that divided the use of color printing, it was common to find the book's opening sections in color, highlighting events like spirit week, homecoming games, prom, graduation, and senior photographs.

Depending on the size of the graduating class and available space in the yearbook, some schools included multiple pictures of seniors, such as a baby or childhood photograph alongside their senior portrait.

Yearbook pages about curriculum content, clubs, and organizations include documentary style and candid photographs of students engaged in learning and activities.

Not all pictures included captions, and some schools omitted captions entirely as a stylistic choice. Group photographs of clubs or athletic teams might provide adjacent captions identifying students by row. For pictures of students engaged in activities, such as a class lecture or choir practice, captions might provide commentary on what was happening in the photo rather than naming individuals.

Yearbook editors and staff used photography to document significant and minor school events, including field trips, guest speakers, college application week, science fairs, school plays, and more.

As camera phones became popular, so did the inclusion of snapshots taken by students outside the yearbook department or yearbook club.

In the late aughts, selfie-style photographs appeared in photo-montage pages of pictures taken during school or extracurricular events.

Photograph sections about faculty and staff, particularly in high schools, often included portraits of the clerical departments, cafeteria staff, and maintenance employees.

Yearbooks from 1981 to the present often include:

• Lists and photographs of "class notables" or descriptive superlatives (most humorous, most talkative, etc.)
• More and larger photographs documenting classroom work, projects, and activities and fewer written descriptions of courses and department activities
• Brief or no descriptions for student athletics and social events. 
• Organizational elements like a table of contents and an index of student names listing pages with their photographs
• A design and layout around a theme, such as a popular culture influence, the school mascot, or an aspirational message
• Around the 2000s and later, schools included sections dedicated to popular culture with headlines and images of popular music, movies, television shows, sports, fashion trends, and celebrities

Information about individual students differs between schools and depends upon the year. Some universities list only a student's name, while high schools might provide more details about a graduating student's achievements, best memories, or advice to the junior class.

Some schools published yearbooks with larger page dimensions and a higher page count. Many schools used the additional space to feature more photographs per section about social events, clubs, organizations, and athletic events. The design ranged from a tight montage of clippings to full-page spreads.

Yearbooks occasionally included student-drawn illustrations and cartoons on section title pages or as margin graphics.

Computer-generated graphics, clip art, and stylized fonts became popular to use in the design of yearbooks.

Many schools focused most of the yearbook content on clubs and organizations, social events, and sports instead of individual student achievements.

Popular television and movies influenced aesthetic choices. Yearbook editors imitated patterns, graphics, logos, and color palettes in graphics and designs.

Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, the 'advertisements’ sections of some yearbooks turned into a place where family or friends could purchase a section to write a message to a graduating student and include additional photographs, a message, or other notes.

Universities, colleges, and high schools celebrating an important anniversary or milestone typically include more historical content in their yearbooks. They usually had information on their founding, influential leadership and administrators, new buildings and facilities, developments in curriculum, highlight events, and photographs of past decades.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many schools admitted students twice a year. Students could begin in the fall or spring semester, and the school held graduation twice a year, winter and summer. This admission schedule means that yearbooks from this time might have multiple sections of seniors, possibly two sections of graduating seniors, and the senior students still taking classes.

Some schools only published yearbooks for graduating students.

In the catalog and finding aid, a one-half fraction after the year designates a mid- or half-year publication, such as "1916 ½."

Since individual schools set admission schedules, some schools published books with February and June graduates from the same calendar year, and others published with June and February graduates from consecutive calendar years. If the school and years you are looking for include a ½ fraction, keep search years flexible and include a year before or after to account for when a student or graduate might be listed.

It was not until around the 1970s that most Chicago grade and high schools solidified a primary enrollment date in the fall and held a single graduation at the beginning of summer. However, colleges and universities still admitted students on a rolling basis.