From Guys and Dolls to bubble soccer, the yearbook has this year covered. After eight months of interviews, pages and deadlines, the yearbook class has completed the 2016 Replay and are preparing to give out the book Wednesday.

“Working on the yearbook is hard but worth it,” sophomore Chloe Hatfield said. “We have to stay late, and spend countless hours outside of class working on the book and you can’t really see the progress you’re making until you’re completely done. It’s fun and stressful, but you get to meet great people, and work on an amazing project.”

The yearbook’s theme is “Perceptive” and will have an unusual design – a Plexiglas cover that allows the viewer to see the first page of the book. And for the first time, students will choose from three color options for the cover: plum, cornflower blue and teal.
The staff began planning the theme and design last spring and settled on the concept at Balfour’s A&M yearbook camp in the summer. After hours of planning and looking into “Perceptive,” the staff came up with a way to set the book apart from all the others in years past.

“When last year’s class presented their theme projects, the staff was stunned by how beautiful and different one of the themes was,” adviser Kel Lemons said. “We took that concept to camp, tweaked the name a little bit and came up with a really cool look that really shows this book’s personality.”
The staff designed 256 pages, keeping in mind the clubs, sports and events they needed to cover. Each staffer received one or two spreads for each deadline. Staffers had roughly a month for each deadline, requiring the staffers to acquire time management skills and become rapid writers.

“Yearbook is really stressful but it’s worth it in the end,” sophomore Caitlin Segraves said. “You get to see the look on people’s faces when they see their picture and you realize that this is something that is going to last forever. This is something that they’ll be able to show their kids ‘Oh yeah, that was my junior year, senior year, sophomore year, freshman year.’ And they could show their kids what we did. It’s our homework but at the same time it lasts forever, it’s not just something you can throw in the trash.”

As part of their goals, the staff wanted to get every student in the book at least twice. With more than 2,000 students and only 256 pages, they were up for a challenge. Similar to last year, the book has quotes at the bottom of each page to add a whole-book link to the theme as well as providing additional coverage on each student. To connect with the “Perceptive” theme, the sidebar is called “I think…” with eight to 11 quotes on each page. The staff gathered more than 1300 responses from students and used 950 of them.

“The ‘I think’ quotes they were really difficult to get,” junior editor Jaci Chavera said. “We did have the goal to get everyone in the school that way everyone has a chance to be in the book, and at times it was difficult keeping track of those so we would ask people multiple times to fill out a quote. Overall, it was a unique way of getting coverage on all those students, because you wouldn’t really think, ‘Oh, this person’s not in anything, so I won’t have to go talk to them,’ so through this we were able to approach them very easily. We chose ‘I think…’ to show how people look at things differently.”

After all the deadlines, the staff is left with not just the finished, but lasting friendships as well.

“Making friends in yearbook is actually pretty easy,” sophomore Haley Moser said. “Sometimes we have a little bit of drama, but I did meet my best friend through the yearbook department so that’s really exciting. It’s honestly one of my biggest ever lasting friendships so it’s really nice being able to work with my best friend on the book and discussing ideas on spreads. Having friends in that class makes dealing with everything a lot easier.”

The 2016 Replay will be distributed Wednesday, May 18 throughout the day in room 6201. Limited copies are still available and can be purchased for $75 in 6203  on the distribution day and $80 after May 18 until sold out.