BlogSchmog | We live as if the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be.

Today is the first day of new student orientation at the School of Informatics. I headed in early to talk up GISA and Indy Startup Weekend, getting to see a slick slideshow movie of all the new faces and their countries of origin. In the midst of local academic excitement over the new crop of techies, an appropriate tweet appeared and pointed me to Yearbook Yourself, with a warning of time suckage. You are similarly warned.

Yearbook Yourself lets you create yearbook photos from your past.

Yearbook Yourself is an interactive ad for shopping malls that allows you to upload a photo and re-imagine it as a yearbook photo in selected years between 1950-2000. Taubman Centers, a national mall owner and operator, partnered with Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis to create the innovative tool. Yearbook Yourself is offered both online and in the physical malls, with the focus on the teen fashion market.

The context of both time and region are important. Each year is accompanied by a brief description of fashion of that period and an appropriate soundtrack. You begin the process by selecting your gender and a specific mall from which to draw your threads and hairstyle. I chose Woodfield Mall, which was the closest such structure to my childehood home until I was a teen.

After you upload a face-forward photo of yourself, you can browse through the years and see yourself in different yearbook photos. Once you find the picture you want, you can save it to a group yearbook and invite others to add their photos to the mix as well.

Some of the older yearbook photos look eerily like my dad (even having used my Mii avatar instead of an actual photo). I appear to have put on a little weight around the turn of the century, but that ’88 hair could actually be mine.

Yearbook photos through the decades

Welcome to all the incoming students for the IU School of Informatics. Have a great semester.