Going into how the yearbook is made, and the effort behind it
Noah Fajardo
Staff Writer
One of the goals that had been set for the yearbook of 2019 was to improve over last year’s road bumps in the progress of making the book. Expectations were hoped to be reached because of past successes and goals.
“I think the reason why is because we had a more organized system,” Maham Junaid (11) said. “We didn’t really have a path or a hierarchy system. Whereas this year, we have the editors following the class and everything and teaching. Mr. Savoie was really great for us. That helped make sure that we didn’t have any typos because we had this system of making sure that every page got checked and then got double-checked.”
As new staffers continue to learn the workings of making the yearbook, there may be times where the work must be split up between editors or checked for errors.
“The other solution is that if there is someone who’s a little bit better with layout…[for example], I always see Logan’s layout looks good. He’s on point with his layout. So if someone needs help with it I’ll be like, ‘Logan, can you help them out really fast? If you’re doing okay, and extra credit points, you know.’,” Maham said. “If I see someone struggling with copy, I know that Divya [co-editor-in-chief of the Eagle Era] is really good with grammar. So if I noticed someone having grammar issues, I’ll have Divya re-read their copy.”
Yearbook interviews for the workings of the book is with a multitude of people centered upon one theme and are short.
“For Yearbook, we have various types of interviews, it’s not for just a piece of writing,” Maham Junaid (11) said. “[The process] would be a really quick interview. It’s just one question. You give me one word, and it’s all based off the emotion that [word] provokes. Other than that, yearbook does a lot of mod interviews for certain things… We do a lot of little profiles… But we do a lot of fun, creative interviews.”
People who are outside of Yearbook and Journalism contribute to the yearbook in other ways whenever there needs to be any help with the people that are in photos or navigating to classrooms and portables.
“One of the main things that people outside of the yearbook do is provide names since there are thousands of kids in this school. It’s really hard to pinpoint people exactly,” Logan Shires (12) said. “For example, finding people’s first, middle, and last names, finding people’s sixth-period classroom, and overall [knowing] where you can find them during lunch. Well, having a compass to guide you to where you want to go is really helpful in those situations.”
Although having students provide names and classroom locations does help the yearbook in terms if identification and classes, this also proves to be a problem pulling people out of classes.
“I don’t think that was a good decision. I want to avoid pulling as many people out of class as possible,” Kitty Lai (11) said. “We’re working that through. But if people stay on task, we wouldn’t even have this problem.”
Students outside of Yearbook and Journalism have helped in other ways besides naming and classroom identification. Students have also helped out in yearbook distribution as well.
“You can also help with the distribution of the yearbook, where you take time out of your sixth-period class to wheel a bunch of heavy books around the entire campus and give them to people,” Logan said. “Last year, we didn’t have that much help, except some guys who like to work out, and that speeds things up. But carrying, like 60 pounds worth of books across the entire campus was pretty fun last year.”
There are still things to better the yearbook staff in the coming years. With a new staff, there are things to learn, as well as new bonds to create with new staff members. This contributes to a book that could be the best of everyone’s ability and creativity.
“I feel like something that could definitely improve on next year is staffers’ skills, which lead to better pages. I feel like if we worked more with them and also I feel like this year we were like a new team. If we have some returners next year, they might be able to help out with this,” Maham said. “So I feel like it’s a skill set that really leads to the product and so each individual page could have been better, had the staffers been more skilled. The designs would have been more complex. They weren’t are not as complex as I wish to. There are some pages that are really, really good, but not all of them. But then again, you can’t make a perfect book.”
Caption: The Yearbook contains the qualities of having a lined out order and bursts of creativity. Most times, these qualities work with imbalance. “Last year’s book it’s like full on watercolor like crazy. It just looks like just like a burst of things with like no sort of pattern and like consistency, whereas this year, it’s like we gave them creativity,” Maham Junaid (11) said. “But we also kind of restricted them to make sure that there were consistency and design elements were being continued throughout the book to keep that whole like idea and theme of what the spark is.”
Eagle Era 