Any year from 1950 to 2020, printed as a poster you can send

01  What it is

Yearmark prints a poster of a single year. Choose one on a timeline running from 1950 to 2020 and the app composes a card out of that year’s facts: the year itself in very large type, the number-one song, the biggest film at the box office, three things that happened, who was in the White House, someone well known born that year, what a gallon of gas cost alongside one other everyday price, and a closing detail worth knowing. Ten facts, one page, sized to be read at a glance.

It exists for one specific human moment: the question "what was the world like the year I was born?", or the year you started school, or the year your parents met. A search engine answers that thoroughly and you forget it immediately afterwards. A poster is the same class of facts arranged so that you take them in in ten seconds and then want to show somebody else.

There is no account, no install, no email address and nothing to type in. You move a slider; the poster changes. Everything is composed in your browser from a fixed set of curated facts, so nothing you do there leaves your device.

02  One poster, eight costumes

The usual way this kind of tool fails is that it is one layout with a different number pasted on top. Yearmark keeps the poster’s anatomy identical for every year and changes everything else: eight decade skins, each with its own palette, display type, background texture and repeating motif. The 1950s skin is called Atomic Diner — halftone speckle and a starburst. The 1960s is Mod Pop. The 1970s is Earth Funk, all warm sunbeam rays. The 1980s is Neon Memphis, drawn over a glowing horizon grid. The 1990s is Rave Zine, deliberately gritty and photocopied. Then Y2K Gloss, Flat Hipster and Soft Modern for the three decades after that.

What you notice first is the jump between decades rather than the differences inside one. A 1955 poster and a 2015 poster look like artifacts from different planets, which is roughly the point of the exercise.

Every one of those pixels is drawn by the app out of type, colour and pattern. No album covers, no film posters, no photographs — song and film titles appear only as short factual references. That is the honest way to do it, and it is also why the exported file is clean enough to print.

03  Save it, send it, or link straight to it

Two buttons sit under the poster. Save poster builds a fresh copy at twice the poster’s design size — 2160 × 2700 pixels — and downloads it as a file named for the year. That is sharp enough to post, to print, or to drop into a birthday card.

Share hands the same image to your phone’s own share sheet, so it arrives in a message as a picture rather than as a link somebody has to decide whether to tap. Desktop browsers have no share sheet; there, Share copies a line of text and the year’s link to your clipboard instead, and the app tells you which of the two actually happened rather than pretending.

Every curated year also has its own address: /1985, /1999, /2015. Send that link and the person receiving it lands on that exact poster, not on a homepage they then have to navigate. And the poster’s own footer carries the Yearmark wordmark with an invitation to make one of their own, so an image that gets saved, re-posted and passed around still leads back to the app.

04  How to move around the years

Drag the timeline or tap along it; with the slider focused, the arrow keys step a year at a time. Above it sit eight decade buttons — 50s through 20s — which jump you to the start of a decade without dragging across seventy years. Curated years are ticked on the rail, so you can see what is ready before you land on it.

Yearmark currently has 25 curated years, spread right across the range: the earliest is 1950 and the latest is 2020. Land on a year that has not been printed yet and you do not get a blank card — the app says so plainly and offers the nearest year that is ready, one tap away. More years go on the press over time.

• Start with your birth year. It is the fastest way to understand what the tool does, and it is the version most people send to somebody.
• Then pull up a parent’s or a child’s birth year and compare the two. Prices carry the contrast hardest — a gallon of gas in 1972 next to a gallon in 2020 says more than a paragraph can.
• Travel by decade button rather than by slider, unless you are deliberately browsing. Dragging across seventy years is slow; the button puts you in 1990 immediately.
• On a phone a screenshot is fine — the poster is composed to stay legible at phone-screen size. Save gives you the cleaner file if you want it.
• Bookmark a year’s link for anything you plan to come back to. /1985 always opens 1985.

05  Where the facts come from

Each year is compiled from several public sources — year-end music charts, box-office records, general historical timelines and published price histories — and then rewritten in our own words rather than copied out of any single reference. Widely reported facts are preferred over obscure ones, because a poster is a summary, not an archive.

Prices are the honest weak spot of any year-in-review. A 1972 gallon of gas was not one number for the whole country, or for the whole of 1972. What the poster gives you is a national average, marked with a tilde, and it is most useful as a comparison — the shape of the change rather than the cent. Read it next to another year and it does its job; read it as a receipt and it will let you down.

If a fact is wrong, we would rather hear about it than not: auto-ai-agency@quantum-solutions.hr. The app’s own guide page carries the fuller note on the data and on the artwork.

06  Questions people ask

Is Yearmark free, and do I need an account?

It is free and there is no account. No sign-up, no login, no install, and nothing to type in — you only pick a year. The app is supported by ads, and it runs in your browser.

Which years can I make a poster for?

The timeline covers every year from 1950 to 2020, and 25 of those years are curated so far, from 1950 and 1955 up to 2018 and 2020. If you land on a year that is not ready yet, Yearmark says so and offers you the nearest curated year in one tap.

Can I download the poster as an image file?

Yes. Save poster downloads a 2160 × 2700 PNG named after the year, which is large enough to print. Share sends the same image through your phone’s share sheet where the platform accepts files, and on desktop it copies the year’s link and a line of text instead. A plain screenshot also works.

Are the posters real album covers or movie posters?

No, and deliberately so. Every poster is drawn by the app from type, colour and pattern; song titles, film titles and names appear only as short factual references. No photographs, no album art, no film posters anywhere in the artwork.

How accurate are the prices on the poster?

They are approximate national averages rather than exact figures for one city in one month, and the poster marks each one with a tilde for that reason. They are there to show how much the cost of ordinary things changed between decades, which they do well — not to serve as a historical price record.

Does Yearmark work on a phone?

Yes. It is built mobile-first and the poster is composed to stay readable on a phone screen, so you can either save the image or just screenshot it. It runs in any modern browser with nothing to install.

07  More from the shelf

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• Handlelabel — Tap your quirks. Print your warning label.
• Tapedeck — Make someone a mixtape.
• Tilewright — Draw seven tiles. Outword the AI.

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