What happened the year you were born - free printable poster

What is on the poster

The year in large type with your own title line above it (a name, "Happy 40th, Sam", or nothing), then two columns. Born in that year alongside lists up to twelve people born that year, each with Wikidata's one-line English description and their birthday. That year lists up to ten events, each with the date its entry carries in Wikipedia's article for the year, to the day where the entry gives one and otherwise to the month, and under its name a smaller line saying what it was: the English description of the event's own Wikidata item, so Plaza Accord is followed by "1985 international agreement on fiscal policy" and Woodstock Festival by "1969 music festival in New York, United States". The descriptions are written by Wikidata's volunteers, not by this page, so their quality varies; about 1 in 50 runs past 120 characters and is ended at a comma or a whole word, never with "...". About 7 % of events have no useful one (none at all, or only their kind, such as "human spaceflight"), and those print their name alone. The poster does not repeat its own year either: "1985 Mexico City earthquake" prints as Mexico City earthquake, "fall of the Berlin Wall" as Fall of the Berlin Wall, and a birth's "(born 1985)" is dropped; the sources list below keeps every name exactly as Wikidata has it. The extra line costs room, so an undated A4 sheet shows seven events (six on US Letter) rather than ten. When the sheet has room for fewer than ten, it keeps the best-known ones (most sitelinks) and still prints them in date order, so a dated 1990 A4 sheet with room for five keeps the FIFA World Cup and the treaty that settled German reunification and drops the Lithuanian declaration of independence. If you add the exact date, the poster also says which weekday you were born on and how many days old you are, with the date it was counted on, because a printed number stops counting. Along the bottom runs a row of what things cost that year in the country you pick, each price with its unit and the office it comes from.

Under the two lists runs That year in culture: the Academy Award for Best Picture for the films of that year, the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded that year (title and author), the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, and up to three inventions or discoveries that Wikidata dates to the year. For 1976 it reads: Best Picture, Rocky (the 1977 Oscars honoured 1976's films); Booker Prize, Saville by David Storey; Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow, who also won that year's Nobel; and Ebola hemorrhagic fever, bohrium and the intron among the discoveries. Mind the two calendars: the Pulitzer of a year honours a book published the year before, while the Booker goes to a book of the same year. A prize not given that year has no line (the Booker began in 1969; there was no Pulitzer for Fiction in 1971, 1974, 1977 or 2012), and Wikidata has no Pulitzer for Fiction before 1945 at all, so those years show none rather than one typed in by hand. The inventions are ranked by sitelinks with asteroids, moons, comets, exoplanets, species and people left out, which still lets odd things through (a 1967 sentence made only of the word "buffalo"); when space runs short the poster drops the lowest-ranked invention first.

The block opens with the Biggest film of the year, the film most people actually went to see: the first row of the highest-grossing films table in English Wikipedia's 1985 in film (or whichever year you pick), read once when the data was built and linked in the sources list to the exact revision it came from. Titles only, never the dollar figure. The article's own yardstick is kept in the label: up to 1976 the tables rank North American rentals, the share of ticket sales the distributor received, typically around half the box office, so 1939 reads Gone with the Wind, highest-grossing in North America (rentals); 1977 to 1987 rank North American gross (1977 is Star Wars, 1985 Back to the Future); from 1988 the tables are worldwide (1997 is Titanic, 2025 Ne Zha 2). Each film is counted under its release year with its whole run, so a December opening such as Titanic belongs to 1997 even though most of its money came in 1998. Sometimes the crowd and the Academy agreed: 1976's biggest film and Best Picture are both Rocky. A year whose article had no such table would simply get no line; every year from 1930 to 2025 has one today.

With an exact date the poster gains one more band above the prices, headed with the day itself (On Sunday 20 July 1969): what happened that day and who was born on it, set larger than the year's lists. The year's lists then give up some room and show a few fewer entries, with each date in a narrow margin beside the name.

A worked example: 14 May 1990 was a Monday, and on 15 October 2026 a person born that day is 13,303 days old. Their 1990 poster lists Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence and Magnus Carlsen among the births and the start of the 1990 FIFA World Cup on 8 June and the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany on 12 September among the events. With Include disasters, attacks and wars ticked, the Gulf War on 2 August comes back among them.

Why disasters, attacks and wars are left off

A year as Wikipedia dates it is mostly bad news. Of the six best-known events of each year from 1930 to 2025 (the ones a poster prints first), 335 of 576, or 58 %, are a disaster, an accident, an attack or a war; left as it was, a "Happy 40th" card for 1985 would lead with the Heysel Stadium disaster, Air India Flight 182, Japan Air Lines Flight 123 and the Mexico City earthquake. So by default every layout (the poster in all three styles, the folded card, the newspaper front page, the poster on the age page and the party quiz) takes the best-known events that are none of those, from a pool of up to 24 stored per year, still up to ten and still in date order. The undated 1985 A4 sheet then prints seven, among them Live Aid, the Schengen Agreement, Expo '85, STS-51-G and the Plaza Accord. The day block follows the same rule: on 29 May 1985 the only event Wikidata dates to that day is the Heysel disaster, so the block borrows from the six days after it instead, as it does for any day with nothing of its own.

Each event is judged once, when the data is built: grim when its Wikidata class is (a kind of) disaster, accident, attack, armed conflict, crime or the like, or when its name holds a word such as earthquake, crash, massacre or a flight number. The judgement is by class and name, not by hand, so it errs in both directions: Live Aid, a benefit concert for famine relief, stays in, and a few dark events that Wikidata classes as none of those stay in too (1943's Sportpalast speech, filed as a speech; 1976's Night of the Pencils). Tick Include disasters, attacks and wars (the link then carries grim=1, and the age page passes it on to the maker) to get every layout back exactly as it was. Some years are mostly war or disaster: 1941, 1943 and 1944 keep three to five of their 24 events, and nothing is invented to fill the gap; the poster prints what there is and one plain line saying how many were left off and how to switch them on.

How popular your name was the year you were born

Type a first name and the page says where it ranked among the names given to babies that year, with the number of babies, from the official list for the chart you picked. For the US it is the Social Security Administration's national baby-name data, counted from Social Security card applications: Anna was the 54th most popular girls' name in the US in 1985: 5,883 babies (Social Security Administration). For the UK it is the Office for National Statistics' Baby names in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland keep their own lists, which this page does not use): Jessica was the 4th most popular girls' name there in 1997, given to 6,090 babies. A name given to both sexes gets both lines; Jessica in the US in 1985 was the most popular girls' name (48,345 babies) and also the 578th boys' name (230). ONS gives tied counts the same rank, and the page says joint when that happens (Willow was joint 983rd in 1997, 21 babies).

Two limits are worth knowing. The ONS full lists start in 1996; before that it published only a top 100 for one year in each decade (1934, 1944 and so on to 1994), with ranks and no counts. A UK birth year before 1996 is answered from its decade's list, and the line names that list's year rather than pretending it is yours: for 1985 it reads from 1984, where Jessica was 40th (by 1994 she was 3rd). A name that is not in that top 100 gets no rank at all. Second, the page keeps the top 1,000 names per sex for every year so each year's list stays around 17 KB to download. In 1985 that covers about 87% of the girls and 94% of the boys in SSA's file; by 2025, with 17,297 different girls' names listed, it covers 74% of girls. A rarer name gets one line saying it is not in the kept list, and that SSA lists only names given to at least five babies of one sex in a year (ONS: three or more). Spelling counts exactly as registered, so Ana, Anna and Hannah are three different names.

The poster prints one small line under its title, for example Anna · No. 54 girls' name in the US in 1985 · 5,883 babies (SSA); untick the box to leave it off. The name itself never leaves your device: once you type, the page fetches that year's whole list from polyatic.com and looks the name up in your browser, the address bar never shows it, and only the Copy link button puts it into a link (n=Anna), so a link you share opens with the name filled in. The lists were downloaded once when the page was built, by a script that kept the source address and the date in each file; the sources list names the file a line came from. There is nothing here about what a name means or where it comes from.

Your Chinese zodiac year and generation

Under the song sits a line for the two things most often asked about a birth year: its Chinese zodiac animal and element, and the generation. Pick 1976 and it reads Year of the Fire Dragon, from 31 January 1976 to 17 February 1977 and Generation X (born 1965–1980); the poster prints the short form, Year of the Fire Dragon · Generation X, under the subtitle. Untick the switch and the poster goes back to exactly how it looked without the line (the link then carries zo=0); the on-screen line and its Copy button stay.

The Chinese year does not start on 1 January but at Chinese New Year, usually the second new moon after the winter solstice, which always falls between 21 January and 20 February. A year alone gives the animal of the Chinese year that began in it; an exact date before that new year gives the previous one, with the reason: Born 20 January 1976: Year of the Wood Rabbit — the Dragon year began on 31 January. The new-year dates are not typed into this page. They come from the Chinese calendar your browser already carries (the Unicode ICU calendar behind Intl.DateTimeFormat), the page finds the day month 1, day 1 begins, and the page's tests check the same calendar in Node for every year from 1930 to 2026. The element and animal then follow from the year's place in the 60-year cycle: ten heavenly stems, two each of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, turn alongside twelve earthly branches, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig, so 1984 began a cycle as the Wood Rat and 1985 was the Wood Ox. That is all the page says about it: no horoscope, personality or compatibility text, which are not facts about a year.

Generations follow Pew Research Center's definitions by birth year: Silent Generation 1928–1945, Baby Boomers 1946–1964, Generation X 1965–1980, Millennials 1981–1996 and Generation Z 1997–2012. Other sources draw the lines a year or two apart (some put Millennials from 1980), so the line names its ranges. A year outside them gets no generation line at all, so 2015 shows only its zodiac year: Pew has not defined a generation after Gen Z, and this page will not invent a name for one.

What happened on the day you were born

Give the exact date and a block headed On Sunday 20 July 1969 (or whatever your day was) appears under the song and on the poster. It holds up to three events Wikidata dates to that very day and up to three people born on that date with Wikidata's one-line description of each. For 20 July 1969 that is the Apollo 11 Moon landing and the start of Operation Boxer, beside the actor Josh Holloway, the singer Vitamin C and the Spanish Catholic prelate Raimo Ramón Goyarrola Belda. Both lists are ranked by sitelinks, the same rough measure of fame as the year's lists, and every entry links its Wikidata item in the sources under the poster.

"That day" is strict. An event counts only if Wikidata stores its point in time or start time to the day (its precision 11), or records it as a dated milestone of a bigger item at day precision, which is how the Moon landing sits on Apollo 11; something Wikidata knows only as "July 1969" or "1969" never appears under a day. Events that started that day and ran on are marked "(began)". A person counts only if their date of birth is stored to the day and they have no second, conflicting birth date. The same rules as the year's list keep calendar months, currencies, sports fixtures, award ceremonies and song contests out of it (the Olympics and the World Cup stay). Wikidata's remaining dated events cluster on elections, launches and disasters, so many days have none of their own; then the block lists up to three events from that week instead, the date and the six days after it, each with its own date, and the heading says so ("That week, 14–20 May"). It never reaches back before your birthday, and in late December it runs on into the next January.

The same honest limits apply as for the year. The day-by-day lists cover every date from 1 January 1930 to 31 December 2025, and a day with no event of its own borrows from that week, labelled as such, rather than passing the year's events off as your day. Older days are better covered than recent ones: almost every day from the 1930s to the 1990s has three births with a Wikipedia page, while in recent years a day may have one person or nobody, and then the block says so in one plain line instead of filling the gap. Descriptions are Wikidata's own words; a long one is shortened at a whole word, never with "…". The day's facts travel in the same per-year file as the rest, so choosing a date fetches nothing new.

The No. 1 song the week you were born

Pick a chart: the US Billboard Hot 100, the UK Official Singles Chart, the German singles chart or the French one (a browser set to the UK or Ireland starts on the UK one, a German-language browser on the German one, a French-language browser in France on the French one, and every other browser, Belgian, Swiss and Canadian French included, on the US one; c=us, c=uk, c=de or c=fr in the link fixes it). With an exact date the page finds the chart week that contains it and prints No. 1 the week you were born: title — artist. For 14 May 1990 that is Killer by Adamski in the UK and Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O'Connor in the US. With only a year it prints the single with the most weeks at No. 1 within that year, and on a tie the one that got there first: for 1990 that is Elton John's Sacrifice / Healing Hands in the UK (5 weeks) and Nothing Compares 2 U in the US (4 weeks). A week counts toward the year it starts in.

A chart week is not always the same seven days. Billboard dates each chart by its magazine issue date, so the page uses the latest issue dated on or before your birthday; when Billboard moved its issues from Mondays to Saturdays, the 25 December 1961 chart stood for twelve days. Wikipedia's UK lists print the date each week starts up to 1969 and the date it ends from 1970, and the page converts the second to the first. From July 2015 the UK chart week runs Friday to Thursday instead of Sunday to Saturday. In a handful of 1950s weeks two records tied at No. 1 in the UK (two versions of Answer Me in December 1953, for example); a birthday in such a week shows both.

Before a chart existed there is no song line. The Hot 100 began with the issue of 4 August 1958, when Ricky Nelson's Poor Little Fool was the first No. 1; Billboard's older sales and airplay charts were different charts, so they are not used in its place. The UK chart began on 14 November 1952 with Al Martino's Here in My Heart. The UK list follows the line the Official Charts Company treats as canonical: the New Musical Express chart until 10 March 1960, then Record Retailer's, and from 1969 the charts compiled by the BMRB and its successors. Ireland has its own Irish Singles Chart, which this page does not carry, so for an Irish birthday the UK chart is the nearer of the two, not the Irish one.

The German and French lists are dated by issue, like Billboard's, so the page shows the latest chart dated on or before your birthday and prints its date: for 13 July 1985 that is 19 by Paul Hardcastle in Germany (chart dated 8 July 1985) and Éthiopie by Chanteurs sans Frontières in France (chart dated 7 July 1985). For the year alone, 1985 gives Live Is Life by Opus (7 weeks) in Germany and Éthiopie (8 weeks) in France. Under each song the poster prints the chart's name as that year's Wikipedia list gives it, because the names change: the German lists mostly say Media Control Top100 Singles Chart up to 2009 (the 1977 list says official German singles chart), then mostly Media Control charts, Official German Charts on the 2017 list and GfK Entertainment charts from 2019. Germany's weekly list starts with the chart dated 7 January 1956 (Peter Alexander's Der Mond hält seine Wacht); the monthly charts before it are not read, so 1930 to 1955 get no German song. In France the SNEP Top 50 starts with the chart dated 4 November 1984; from 5 October 1955 to then Wikipedia's yearly lists follow what they call the French Singles & Airplay Chart Reviews, which is not the Top 50, and the poster says so by printing that name. The French list later grows to a Top 100 and a Top 200, and in the years Wikipedia splits it in two (physical and digital singles, 2005 to 2011; download and streaming, 2015 to 2017) the page takes the first column and adds its heading where the table has one to the chart name, for example SNEP Top 100 Singles (Download). 1975 in France gives Tu t'en vas by Alain Barrière and Noëlle Cordier, ten weeks at No. 1.

Denmark and Spain have prices on this page but no chart. English Wikipedia lists Danish No. 1s week by week only from 2000 (the 1987 to 1999 lists give a month, not a date) and Spanish ones only for 2009 to 2011, so a Danish or Spanish birthday would mostly get no answer; the page says so instead of showing another country's song.

The weeks come from Wikipedia's lists of number ones: one page per year for the Hot 100, Germany and France, and one per decade for the UK. A script read each page once through Wikipedia's public API and kept only the chart-week date, the title, the artist and the page's revision id, so the sources list under the poster links the exact version of the list the song was taken from. Titles and artists are printed as the list gives them, including double A-sides ("Sacrifice / Healing Hands").

What things cost the year you were born

Pick United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Spain or France under the song (a browser set to one of those countries, or to German, Danish, Spanish or French with no country, starts on it, every other one on the US, and cc=us, gb, de, dk, es or fr in the link fixes it). The block shows up to five lines for the year, each with its unit and source, and the same row is printed along the bottom of the poster. For the US in 1976 it reads: federal minimum wage $2.30 an hour from 1 January 1976; median price of a new house $44,200; a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline $0.61; and $1 in 1976 buys about what $5.70 buys in 2025. For the UK in 1986: an average house at £30,494, a sliced 800g white loaf at 43p, and £1 in 1986 buys about what £4.10 buys in 2025; there is no minimum-wage line because the UK had none until 1 April 1999, when it started at £3.60 an hour for workers aged 22 and over.

Every number is read from an official series, never estimated. US: the federal minimum wage from the Department of Labor's history table (from 1938; the rate for jobs covered since the 1938 Act, and many states set a higher one); the median sales price of new houses sold, land included, from the Census Bureau's Survey of Construction (from 1963); gasoline and white pan bread from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' average-price series for a U.S. city average (unleaded regular from 1976, leaded regular for 1974 and 1975, bread per pound from 1980). UK: the top adult minimum wage from GOV.UK and the Low Pay Commission (from 1999; younger workers had lower rates); the UK House Price Index average for all property types from HM Land Registry (from 1969, its first full year); unleaded petrol per litre (from 1990) and an 800g white loaf (sliced from 1968, unwrapped before that, back to 1914) from the ONS's average prices.

Germany, Denmark, Spain and France are shown in the money of the time: Deutsche Mark, kroner, pesetas or francs (old francs before 1960, when 100 became one new franc), and from 2002 euros. The “buys today” line starts from a round sum of that money and, for the DM, the peseta and the franc, converts it at the fixed euro rate (1.95583 DM, 166.386 pesetas, 6.55957 francs to one euro). For France in 1990 it reads 100 francs in 1990 buys about what €27 buys in 2025, from INSEE's coefficients for the franc and the euro (series 011813530, the one behind INSEE's own converter, used from 1945); in Germany DM 100 in 1980 buys about what €130 buys in 2024, from Destatis' long series: the German consumer price index from 1991 and, before it, the West German cost-of-living index for all private households back to 1962, joined at 1991 (the page says so on the line). Denmark uses Statistics Denmark's annual consumer price index (table PRIS8, 1900 = 100): 100 kr. in 1980 buys about what 350 kr. buys in 2025. Spain is different: INE publishes no index level before 2002, only its monthly 12-month rates, so the Spanish line chains INE's December rates (one decimal each, from December 1962) and compares Decembers: 1,000 pesetas in December 1980 buys about what €36 buys in December 2025.

Minimum wages: France's gross hourly SMIC from INSEE's table of every rate since 1980, in francs to 2001 and euros after, with the date each rate came into force (it changed five times in 1982, so a year can list several); Germany's statutory minimum wage from the Mindestlohnkommission, which began at €8.50 an hour on 1 January 2015 (there was none before); Denmark has no statutory minimum wage, pay floors are set by collective agreements for specific sectors (Eurostat), and the block says that in one line. Spain's minimum wage is the salario mínimo interprofesional (SMI), which the government sets by decree in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE). The Spanish block shows the monthly rate of the decree in force on 1 July of your year, in pesetas to 2001 and euros from 2002, with the decree's name and its BOE id, which the sources list links: for 1980, 22,770 pesetas a month for workers aged 18 and over from 1 June 1980 (Real Decreto 1257/1980, BOE-A-1980-13895). Sixteen years had two decrees, among them every year from 1970 to 1981 (a new rate in April, in 1980 in June, and from 1976 to 1979 a revision each October), and the line says which one it shows. From 1990 each decree also sets an annual minimum of 14 monthly payments (twelve months and two extra payments of 30 days), so 2019 reads €900 a month in 14 payments (€12,600 a year). Until 1997 the rate is the adult one (younger workers had lower rates); from 1998 one rate covers every age. In 2021 the line shows the 2020 rate of €950, which Real Decreto-ley 38/2020 kept in force until the new decree took effect on 1 September. Spain's first SMI is Decreto 55/1963 (BOE-A-1963-1598): 60 pesetas a day or 1,800 a month from 1 January 1963, so a year before it says in one line that Spain set its first minimum wage in 1963. The decrees before 1975, and both of 1983, are in the BOE only as scans of the printed page; their figures were checked against the scan's text layer, and the three it garbles (1963, 1972 and 1973) were read from the page image. Everyday prices appear only where an official average-price series covers the year: France's baguette per kilo from INSEE, from 1992 (INSEE states it in euros even for the franc years, so the page does too). Germany, Denmark and Spain have no such line, and nothing is borrowed from the US or UK series.

Three honest caveats. The BLS publishes gasoline and bread prices by month and the UK House Price Index is monthly too, so the page shows the plain average of that year's twelve monthly figures and says so; a year missing a month is left out. Before 1971 British prices are shown in today's decimal pence, as the ONS publishes them: the 1.6p loaf of 1930 was about fourpence. And the "buys today" line is the ratio of two annual values of a price index (the BLS CPI-U for the US, the ONS long-run Retail Prices Index series CDKO for the UK), rounded to two significant figures: it says what an average basket of goods cost, not any single item, and it names the latest full year of the index it used. When a series does not reach back to your year, its line is simply missing; prices are never converted from the other country.

Where the facts come from

The No. 1 singles, the prices and the first-name ranks (Social Security Administration for the US, Office for National Statistics for England and Wales) come from the sources described above. Every other fact is from Wikidata, the free, CC0-licensed database behind Wikipedia's infoboxes, and every one links its own item in the sources list under the poster. People are items that are a human with a date of birth in the year.

The year's events start from people, not from a database query. English Wikipedia's article for each year (1989, say) has an Events section, month by month, where editors list what mattered. The build script read each article once through Wikipedia's public API and kept its revision id, which the sources list links. Every dated entry there ("November 9 – Fall of the Berlin Wall: ...") is reduced to the articles it links, each matched to its Wikidata item, and the entry gives the best-known one that is an event in its own right: an item Wikidata classes under "occurrence" and dates itself (point in time, start time or launch date) to that same year. That rule is what drops the background in an entry: "Vietnam War: the first U.S. troop withdrawals" links a war that began in 1955, and "Cold War" or "Apollo program" are not that year's events, so neither is printed. The line on the poster is the Wikidata item's English label, word for word, dated with the entry's own date; when several entries link the same event, the one on the day Wikidata gives for it wins, and an event Wikidata dates to the day is never taken from an entry before it began, so the Normandy landings sit in June 1944, not on the April entry about a rehearsal for them.

Some things are left out by class, whatever their fame: calendar months ("April 2008"), currencies ("Fijian dollar"), sports seasons, tournaments and matches, award ceremonies and song contests such as Eurovision. The only sports allowed are the Summer and Winter Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, and at most one sports line a year, so 2008 keeps the Beijing Olympics and loses Euro 2008. No more than two lines a year may be the same kind of thing in Wikidata's terms, so the space race does not fill 1965 with five Gemini flights. A year whose article yields fewer than six events would be topped up from Wikidata's own dated events of the year, under the same rules, and the sources list says so; the classes behind every printed event are committed with the page's tests so the rules can be re-checked without asking Wikidata again.

Both lists are ranked by sitelinks: how many Wikipedia language editions and other Wikimedia projects have a page on that person or event. It is a rough, honest measure of worldwide fame, with known biases: it favours footballers and actors over scientists, and Europe over the rest of the world. Nothing is added by hand. A few items are taken out by rule: people with no English description, a description that names a different birth year, an obvious data error, a near-duplicate event (one whose label contains another's), and people who died as young children, since this is a birthday poster. If a fact is missing from Wikidata, it is missing here.

Recent years are thin. Somebody born in 2023 is not famous yet, so the births for the 2020s are mostly royal babies and the children of famous parents, 2022 to 2024 have only five to eight names, and for 2025 the list also takes people who have a Wikidata item but no Wikipedia page yet. The years stop at 2025. The facts were built once with a script that reads Wikipedia's API and Wikidata's public query service and stored as one file per year (about 36 KB compressed, most of it the day-by-day block), so the page loads only the year you pick and never contacts Wikidata, Wikipedia or anyone else.

A newspaper front page of the day you were born

The Front page style sets the same facts as the front page of a paper that never existed. Try 20 July 1969 for Anna: the masthead reads The Anna Gazette, the dateline Sunday, 20 July 1969, and the headline is Apollo 11: Moon landing, with Wikidata's description of the event under it. A short name in the title line becomes "The <name> Gazette"; a longer line ("Happy 40th, Sam") prints as typed; no title gives The Day You Were Born. Below the headline, three columns hold the rest of that day's events, the year's events with their dates, the people born that day and that year, the No. 1 single, the prices and the year's films, books and prizes, shrinking the type a little or leaving out the least-known births and events when the sheet is full, never cutting a line short.

The headline is the event with the most sitelinks among those Wikidata dates to your exact day. About half of all days from 1930 to 2025 have none of their own (18,115 of 35,038), and then the headline is the best-known event of the whole year, labelled The year's best-known event rather than passed off as that day's news. Paid birthday newspapers either reprint a real paper's archived front page or write their own copy; this one does neither. There is no article text, no invented quotes, no adverts and no photos, and no real newspaper's name. The footer says so in plain words: Not a real newspaper: every line is a fact from the sources listed on polyatic.com/year-born, and the page's tests check every printed line against the facts file. It is set in Times, the serif every PDF reader carries, black on pale grey, and it prints cleanly on a black-and-white printer. Like the other styles it downloads free as PNG or PDF at A4, US Letter and every frame size.

A "back in 1985" party quiz, answers on page two

The Party quiz style turns the year into a printable trivia sheet for a milestone birthday. Try Sam's 40th, back in 1985: twelve questions on one page, each with four options lettered A to D, a Name and Score line at the foot, and the answer key on page two of the PDF. The PNG download is page one; Answers PNG is page two.

Every question comes from the same facts as the poster, so every right answer is sourced: which single spent the most weeks at No. 1 (Like a Virgin by Madonna in the US in 1985, from Wikipedia's list of number ones), the Best Picture, the year's highest-grossing film, the Booker, Pulitzer and Nobel winners, an invention or discovery, a price (a US gallon of regular gasoline averaged $1.20 in 1985; the BLS average for 1986 was 93 cents), people born that year and events of the year. A kind of fact the year does not have is skipped: there is no song question before the charts began (1952 in the UK, 1958 in the US), and no Booker before 1969.

The wrong options are what make it fair. Each one is a true fact of the same kind from one of the five years either side, never invented: on the 1985 sheet Back to the Future (the year's biggest film in North America) is up against E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from 1982, Three Men and a Baby from 1987 and Rain Man from 1988, so a guest who remembers the decade still has to remember the year. An option that also appears anywhere in the quiz year's own facts is never used as a wrong one. Page two gives each answer, the year every wrong option belongs to, and one source per question: the Wikidata item, the Wikipedia revision or the statistics series it was read from.

Events of the year are limited to ones a party can laugh about. The quiz draws them from the same pool the poster prints, with the disasters, attacks and wars already left off, and then drops anything whose name or description still mentions a death, a crime, a war, a crash or a disaster. One exception keeps Live Aid in: a description that is grim only because it names the cause money was raised for (Wikidata describes Live Aid as a concert that "raised massive funds for famine") does not count. A 1985 quiz can so ask about Live Aid, the Schengen Agreement and the Plaza Accord, three event questions where it used to have two; labels holding a number (Expo '85, STS-51-G) are never asked because they give the year away. Ticking Include disasters, attacks and wars brings back the quiz exactly as it was before, which still asks about none of them. People are judged the same way by their description. The quiz is seeded by the year, the chart and the country, so the same link always prints the same quiz and a guest can check the key on their own phone; Shuffle picks another set of questions and puts q=1, q=2 and so on in the link. The Copy button gives the whole quiz, answers included, as plain text.

Why there are no lyrics, cover art or photos

Paid "year you were born" prints often reproduce lyrics, album covers, film stills and press photos. Those are copyrighted works, and a poster you print, frame and give away should not carry somebody else's words or pictures, so this one leaves them out. The titles of songs and films are another matter: a title is a fact, like a name or a date, so the No. 1 single appears by title and artist only, with no lyrics, audio, cover art or streaming link. The rest of the poster holds names, short descriptions and dates. It is typography only: four styles, light, dark, a warm vintage paper and the newspaper front page, each tested to stay readable when printed in black and white.

How to print it

A browser set to the US, Canada, Mexico or the Philippines starts on US Letter, every other one on A4, and an sz= in the link overrides both (sz=50x70cm, sz=18x24in; the older p=a4 and p=letter still work). The Size menu holds the two home papers, A3, five standard frame sizes (30 × 40 cm and 50 × 70 cm, common European poster frames, and 8 × 10, 11 × 14 and 18 × 24 inches, common American ones) and the folded card described below. They are the star map's own sizes, and the star-map link under the poster passes yours on, so the two posters come out the same size for a pair of matching frames. The layout follows the sheet: A3 and 50 × 70 cm have nearly A4's shape (1 : 1.41 and 1 : 1.4), 30 × 40 cm and 18 × 24 in are 3 : 4, and 8 × 10 in is the squarest at 4 : 5, so on the squarer sheets the lists hold one or two entries fewer. No line is cut off or ended with an ellipsis; a long name shrinks or wraps instead.

The folded birthday card

Folded card, the last choice in the Size menu, turns the same facts into a card rather than a poster. It is one landscape sheet, A4 (297 × 210 mm, a PDF page of 842 × 595 points) or US Letter (11 × 8.5 in, 792 × 612 points), printed on one side and folded once down the middle: A4 folds to A5, Letter to 5.5 × 8.5 in. The right half is the front, a compact version of the poster in the style you picked: your title line, the year, the zodiac and generation line, the four to six best-known events that fit, the No. 1 single and one price. The left half becomes the back and carries a single small line, Made free at polyatic.com/year-born. The inside is left blank to write in, and the card never prints a greeting you did not type yourself. Short dashed marks at the top and bottom edges show the fold; they stop before the frame, so nothing on the front runs across the crease. The preview shows the front only. The card has room for far less than a poster, so births, the culture band and the day's block stay on the poster; print the poster as well if you want them. On a home printer use card of 200 to 250 g/m2 at actual size, score the fold first, and expect a thin white edge where the printer cannot reach the paper's border. A C5 envelope (162 × 229 mm) fits the A5 card and an A9 envelope (5.75 × 8.75 in) the Letter card; if you have neither, the Envelope Maker prints an envelope template for a custom card size.

The PDF is one page of exactly the chosen size with the image filling it, which is what a print shop asks for. The PNG is 300 dots per inch up to A3 (2480 × 3508 pixels for A4, 3508 × 4961 for A3, 2400 × 3000 for 8 × 10 in). Browsers will not reliably draw one canvas much bigger than that, so the two largest sizes are capped at A3's 17.4 million pixels: 3525 × 4935 at 50 × 70 cm, which is 179 dpi, and 3612 × 4816 at 18 × 24 in, 201 dpi. The line under the menu says which you have. At home, choose 100 % or actual size in the print dialog, not fit to page. Matte paper of 170 g/m2 or more looks much better than copy paper, and the dark style uses a lot of ink, so a copy shop is the better place for that one.

The copy box gives the same poster as plain text for a card or a message, and Copy link gives an address that opens this exact poster, with the year, date, chart, country and title already filled in. The song box and the price block each have their own Copy button.