The final date to purchase a yearbook online is this Friday, February 25th. This deadline, which is much sooner than the purchase date in years past, is due to Yearbook Club’s decision to move the book’s release from August to May, making the book a “spring release” book, one of the many changes Yearbook Club has done in an attempt to improve the it.

The Yearbook editors made the decision in the fall and announced their decision last month in a push to garner more sales. The choice to make the book a spring release was a big change for the editors, who have had to put in extra hours everyday to get the book complete on time.

“The switch to a spring release book is a huge deal,” Ruby Brown, marketing and advertising editor, said. Brown, who has been a part of the club for three years, has never done a spring release book, nor has Bennett Proegler, photography editor, who has been a part of the club since his freshman year.

“CHS has never really done [a spring release book] before, at least not in a long, long time,” Emily Cousino, design editor, said.

The decision was made after the editors travelled to a three-day yearbook workshop over the summer. There, they gathered ideas on how to improve the yearbook, and took many of these ideas and used them to not only make a spring release book, but also redesign the yearbook as a whole.

“Redesigning the book has been interesting,” Cousino, who headed the redesign project, said. “It took awhile for me to figure out the general underlying style that we were going to go with, but after hours of practice I have definitely gotten much quicker and much better.”

Cousino worked this year on making the yearbook have a more traditional style by adding modules, or “mods.” These mods include polls, senior spotlights, and student opinions.

“[Mods] allows us to be more versatile in how we cover events,” Proegler said.

New events at the school, such as the Chelsea Spirit and Excellence Awards, Europe trip, Quiz Bowl, and a day in the life of a CHS student, have all been covered in the book through student life and special coverage spreads. The book will still cover the usual events, like sports and clubs that have been covered in years past.

In addition to a spring release and a redesigned interior, the editors also improved the way they write in the book by incorporating interviews into their copies and mods.

“Rather than just covering stuff on a surface level, we ended up going in deeper and doing interviews with the people in the sport and such,” Proegler said.

Brown encouraged all who have not purchased a revitalized yearbook to do so before the deadline, so as not to miss out on the opportunity to get a book in the spring.

“With the early release, students are going to be able to finally sign books again like when we were back in middle school,” Brown said. “What I like about actually being able to sign yearbooks is that I will be able to look at the book 20 or 30 years from now and see all the names of the people I used to hang out with all the time and all the memories that come from being in high school.”

Proegler and Cousino agreed, advising people to buy to experience the new yearbook firsthand.

“If you look back through our archives of books, the book has been pretty much the same. It’s covered the same sports, it’s covered them in the same way,” Proegler said. “The fact that this year’s book is covering your school year in a completely different manner than it than we have before makes it a wonderful investment. This book is so different from all the books we’ve done in the past.”