Having fun in print with those Simpsons movie avatars
Pilot artist Bob Voros stumbled across this yesterday at NewsPageDesigner. It’s from the Toledo Free Press, a free tab that circulates about 150,000 copies weekly in Toledo, Ohio.
They turned local politicans into Simpsons characters:
We were playing with the create-your-own-Simpsons-avatar tool just the other day, before The Simpsons Movie opened. We created avatars of ourselves. You may recall that I blogged about it.
But it to us to actually do anything in print with them!
Bob smacked himself in the head, wishing he had thought of it. I felt the same way, so I smacked Bob in the head, too.
Then, we contacted the artist responsible — James Molnar, a rising junior at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He’s working as a design intern this summer at the Toledo Free Press.
He responds:
I’m glad to hear that you liked the page I posted. Honestly, I was surprised you found it. I just upload my clips and never dreamed of someone looking at them.
Ah, modesty. You gotta love college-aged designers.
James agreed to answer a few questions for us:
Q. How did you come up with this idea?
A. I cannot take credit for the entire project.
It began with our editor in chief, Michael Miller, a HUGE Simpsons fan. He had seen a Web site that turned its staff’s pictures into avatars. His idea was to change his column’s mug to an avatar. I suggested we go all out and change every columnist mug; he agreed to it.
Then, fellow intern Chase Purdy suggested making avatars of politicians or well-known Toledoans.
From there, all graphic boxes were changed to Simpsons yellow and the cover, as planned, was all Simpsons. So Chase and I spent countless hours on the two Simpsonizing sites creating avatars.
Q. How on Earth did you sell an idea like that?
A. I didn’t have to sell the idea. Our editor is very open to ideas, especially since it’s summer. With the movie being one of the last huge pop culture moments of the summer, he wanted to play it big.
(I had also suggested to him: let’s find Toledo’s Homer Simpson, but after searching we couldn’t find one.)
James asked us to name-check his design editor, Andrea Rodriguez-Ahl, and the Free Press’ advertising design director, Whitney Brennan, who designed the cover for the issue:
Q. What was the reaction from readers? From the politicans? From your editors?
A: Everything was positive. One politician told an ad rep that in his kids’ eyes, he was now “cool.” Another politician said he opened up the paper on Sunday and saw his picture and laughed; he loved it. And everyone at the paper loved it as well.
Q. What year are you? When do you graduate?
A. I am going to be a junior at Marquette University (graduating June 2009) and I’m looking for a design internship next summer. *wink ;-)
Here are a few more samples of James’ work this summer in Toledo:
Find his portfolio at NewsPageDesigner:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=12833
Chase Purdy attends Hillsdale College in Michigan. Find his portfolio here:
http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=13377
Find the tool that allows you to make a Simpsons avatar of yourself here (but you’ll have to register):
http://www.simpsonsmovie.com
A thread at News Artists Organization consisted of several folks posting avatars of themselves. Find that here:
http://www.newsartists.org/forums/showthread.php?p=29511#post29511
August 9th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Wow, this was a fantastic idea. Great job by everyone at the Toledo Free Press, especially James. Nice to see my alma mater is still turning out great journalists.
August 9th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Love the idea. One question though: Are there any copyright issues with printing avatars created from the Simpsons site? Are the “illustrations” of the body parts copyrighted? Just asking because I would’ve expected to see more papers do something similar with the pre-movie hype, but this was the first instance I saw.