The school yearbook, everyone’s favorite thing to drop a hot seventy-five dollars on at the end of the year. It’s a lasting memory for the previous year, and for seniors, high school entirely.

The senior yearbook photos have been up for debate in terms of their new design ideas, a three-quarter length shot will replace the previous shoulders-and-up photos.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s always nice to try something new, but sometimes it honestly isn’t. The senior yearbook page has always looked sharp, including a perfectly-manicured design and a picture directly of the student. Unfortunately for the 2017-18 year, Perry has decided to do away with our classic design. This year’s seniors will no longer have a professional portrait, but rather will be replaced with a student’s knee caps.

In addition to this change, I’m assuming the page layout will be changed as well. More pages will be necessary or the pictures will be minimized. Either way, the aesthetic of the three-quarter shot is atrocious to begin with. Pictures from the knees up look awkward. It will be like a bunch of Gumby’s but striking slightly different poses.

This leads us to another point, everyone will be doing something different. One boy could have his arms crossed, while one girl could have her hands on her hips. It’s just strange and unorganized. With the head shots, the only thing you had to worry about was if your face looks contorted, but now you’ve got to worry about your whole body looking contorted — from the knees up anyway.

And that could lead to another issue too, some people are just not comfortable with making their body the main statement as well. Obviously, most people are insecure with something about themselves, whether it be their voice or weight. This is one major factor that makes the three-quarter shots such a negative; students should love their senior headshots but that could be ruined for them because they don’t feel confident with how their picture turned out. Why should we turn an important memory into just another thing for students to nit-pick their flaws from?

In terms of clothes, why did having to plan an entire outfit become a task harder than solving a Rubik’s Cube? The dress code was vague: obviously nothing promiscuous — not that that hasn’t stopped anyone before — but why do I find myself waiting in a dress to have my picture taken and see other girls wearing jeans and a cute top? Now I feel like an overdressed idiot, and the yearbook will feature some students going to the Met Gala while the rest to the movies. If they expected this to work, which it clearly did not, the dress code should have been a lot more specific. Perhaps this is a problem only the ladies faced, as Lou Coopey explicitly told the boys a suit jacket and tie was the way to go. If we had just stuck to the headshot no one would have to worry about this, simply making sure one’s shoulders we covered.

Wouldn’t it have been nice for the seniors to have a say? I mean, sure it’s not like the school is required to, but it would have been an appreciated sentiment. Of course the yearbook is for everyone, but let’s be honest, its significance lies with the seniors. There’s the nice spread of yearbook photos with each student’s activities listed by his or her name, and countless pages of special dedicated pages the graduates.

Change can be good, but not in this instance. Let’s just go back to what we know works and cover those ‘caps.