If you have been on Snapchat you are probably familiar with geofilters. If you swipe after taking a picture or video you have a variety of filters catered to your area. If you were to swipe through geofilters while at Oak Park within the past month you might have noticed a new filter. Oak Park now has its own geofilter.

Sophomore Skyler Benjamin designed the geofilter over the summer.

“I watched a YouTube video and I went to PicMonkey and designed it myself,” Benjamin said.

It took Benjamin only about 30 minutes to design and two hours to process. Snapchat then sent an email confirming that they received it and it was going to be reviewed. A week later and the design had been approved.

“The hardest part was to get every little arrow in the same spot because [you could only put down one arrow at a time],” Benjamin said.

Cheerleading coach Kelsey Mayaab is credited at being the first person to discover the filter when taking a selfie with the cheerleaders on a bus ride.

“I like it, I think it’s fun because Staley has theirs, I think we should have ours,” junior Ali Scalzi said.

There has been some negative feedback though.

“A lot of people said it was really girly,” Benjamin said.

Benjamin isn’t letting the criticism get to her. She was even planning on designing another filter for Oak Park.

“I was planning on it, but then a lot of people were asking me how I did it so I was going to wait a little bit and see if they wanted to do it because I don’t want to be a hog and do it all,” Benjamin said.

She even shared the process on a national scale by writing for SchoolJournalism.org and encouraging other students to create one for their schools.

The next time you are on Snapchat try out the new Oak Park filter and add us @northmennews.