Charles Apple

The other day, digging desperately for some long-forgotten and rarely-used address, I found myself digging through a huge batch of old business cards.

Two things struck me: 1) I’ve been around so long that I’ve collected a hell of a lot of cards. And 2) Most of the cards in my collection are so old to be laughable. I really need to weed some of these suckers out.

Naturally, that means I can probably squeeze a decent blog post out of it.

Here are some of the more interesting cards I still have kicking around my office:

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BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS DEPT.

Before he was a big-shot at the Fort Myers News-Press; before he was the sports design go-to guy in Fort Lauderdale, Javier Torres was an artist with the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star.

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As an instructor at Mizzou, James Bennett invited me to speak to his classes. Later, he went on to several big years at The Boston Globe before becoming AME of The Bakersfield Californian.

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When I met him in 1994 at Poynter, Terence Oliver was the assistant art director of the Akron Beacon Journal. I was just a young punk who didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

Now, Terence is a big-time journalism design professor at Ohio University. I’m just an old punk who doesn’t know what the hell I’m doing.

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Before she was (take a deep breath) Executive Director for Product Innovation at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Monica Moses spent several years on the faculty at the Poynter Institute.

And, before that, Monica was the design director of The Charlotte Observer.

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Can you remember a time before Steve Dorsey was at the Freep? Me, neither. But it was so. This card proves it.

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After he won awards for designing KidNews at the Chicago Tribune but before he became the A1 guy for the Sun-Times and the Red Streak, founded VizEds and went into big-time consulting, Robb Montgomery was the design guru for a very nice-looking chain of papers located in the western ‘burbs of Chicago.

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Yeah, she became the Executive Editor of The Savannah Morning News. An she’s now a columnist for that paper. But I met Rexanna Lester when she anchored the downtown Atlanta bureau of the Morris News Service.

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UP-AND-COMING DEPT.

Want to see tomorrow’s hot collectible today?

Before she became famous for winning “The Intern” contest in Orlando, Carrie Hoover was a designer for the Michigan State student paper and a summer design intern at The Pilot. At this very moment, she’s interning at The San Jose Mercury News.

Carrie’s very sharp. Consider her the next big thing.

Heads up, Mansfield: She’ll have your job before long!

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COOLEST CARD EVER DEPT.

My old Chicago Tribune pals Rick Tuma and Steve Ravenscraft showed up at SND/Orlando last fall armed with these spiffy, custom-drawn business cards. They beat the standard-issue Trib cards with a stick. Rick is truly a world-class cartoonist; it goes hand-in-hand with his being truly a world-class nice guy.

All business cards wish they could be this cool.

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PICK ON YOURSELF DEPT.

Natually, I can’t do this without showing off some of my own vintage stuff…

I didn’t have a business card when I worked at The Athens Banner-Herald/Daily News, but I did have this proof of membership in the Georgia Press Association. I was in Athens from 1986 to 1988.

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After my exile in Georgia, I spent nearly five years back in the town where I attended college: Rock Hill, S.C.

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How many vertical business cards have you seen? The unusual format makes this one rather distinctive, I think. I was in Raleigh from 1993 to 1996.

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At one point during my time in Raleigh, I was awarded a six-week fellowship at Duke University. This ID proves two things: 1) I have just enough evidence to fool some folks into thinking I’m a Duke alumnus. And 2) I did, in fact, have hair once.

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I moved to the Chicago Tribune in 1996.

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Because I was still doing a lot of graphics reporting, the Trib had me put in for an official press pass from the City of Chicago. When I held this card in my hand, I thought all the famous journalists before me who had been granted similar credentials. Just the notion of it got me all choked up.

Or maybe it was the food in the Trib cafeteria. I don’t recall.

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In 1999, I moved into management in Des Moines. I was issued three separate business card designs in five years at The Register. This was the first — and the only one that didn’t make you puke when you saw how ugly it was.

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And, of course, this is my current card. No, I don’t know when The Pilot will redesign our cards to match our new nameplate.

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So what kind of interesting business cards are lurking the the back of your desk drawers?

Bonita Burton, Assistant Managing Editor for Presentation of The Orlando Sentinel, posted last week at VizEds:

You may have heard we had a devastating plane crash in a residential area here last week that demolished several houses, killed five people and left three others fighting for their lives in a burn unit:

So you can understand why our online readers had a problem with this pop-up ad:

Yeah: That’s pretty bad.

Here’s one from the Chicago Tribune, earlier this year. In case you can’t read it, the article is about a severed human leg that fell from a plane into a backyard. But — Yikes! — check out that adjacent ad from United Airlines touting “more legroom”:

Visual culture blogger Dennis Dunleavy provides this example, in which MTV’s news site paired up video of the Virginia Tech shootings with a truly unfortunate ad promoting the movie Smokin’ Aces:

 
Kate Zimmermann of SearchViews gives us this similar snapshot of Yahoo News on the day of the Tech shootings:

And then, there is this unflattering article about print newspapers that appeared on the Media Daily News web site last spring. This helping of gloom-and-doom was brought to you, naturally, by the good folks at the Newspaper Association of America:

Here, it looks like Fox News is commenting on Wesley’s Clark’s bid for the White House. But no, that’s a headline about the approach of Hurricane Isabel. Ironically, the headline would have been accurate for either story:

A couple of weeks ago, the Oddee Web site posted a collection of interesting badly juxtapositioned ads. A few samples:

It took me a while to “get” this one. But once I did, I nearly fell off my chair:

So: what’s the worst juxtaposition you’ve ever seen?

Find Oddee’s “15 Unfortunately Placed Ads” here:
http://www.oddee.com/item_87332.aspx

Read Dennis Dunleavy’s article “Not A Pretty Picture: When Ad and News Messages Collide” in his blog, The Big Picture:
http://ddunleavy.typepad.com/the_big_picture/2007/04/not_a_pretty_pi.html

Read Kate Zimmermann’s article about “The Suckiness of Contextual Ads” at the SearchViews web site:
http://www.searchviews.com/index.php/archives/2007/04/virginia-tech-shootings-role-of-social-media-search-in-journalism-and-the-suckiness-of-contextual-ads.php

See more examples of bad juxtaposition at the eMedia Strategist:
http://www.emediastrategist.com/blog/?p=33

Read the original thread at VisualEditors:
http://www.visualeditors.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6607

The other day, we posted an analyis of several U.S. newspaper web sites, examining how large — or, perhaps, how bloated — their home pages may be.

Today, “Cal” — an 18-year-old student living in Surrey, England — rates five popular British newspaper web sites.

His findings are considerably less detailed than those of the Bivings Report. But they’re much closer to how, I suspect, average readers feel.

The reviews are quite brief. A couple of even more brief excerpts:

The Sun
Design: It’s like a sex-starved 13 year old has been let loose; with pictures of nekkid women; and a shark.
Actual News: None.

The Independent
Design: Slightly boring.
Actual News: Situated below the bizarre front-page article. There’s lots though.

If you do any work at all with your paper’s web operation, make sure you read this:
http://adventuresofsupercal.blogspot.com/2007/07/newspaper-websites.html

Read our previous post about the Bivings Report here:
http://www.visualeditors.com/apple/2007/07/a-report-on-the-size-of-newspaper-home-pages/