A few Star Trek A1 page toppers
The new Star Trek movie was released last night. I originally had plans to go today with Bob Voros, but I’m still with my dad in University Hospital in Augusta, Ga. I’m not quite sure when I’ll see the movie.
If you designed a cool features page or something, please send it to us. We’d love to see it.
Meanwhile, I found a few notable page one skybox treatments I thought I’d share with you.
Here’s the top of today’s Virginian-Pilot. It’s very pretty. However, there’s a very basic problem with it:
What’s the problem? That’s not the Enterprise from the new movie. That’s the one from the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture from 1979 (and reused in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in 1982.) Granted, there aren’t many shots available of the new ship. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea to use the wrong ship from the wrong movie.
The folks from the Daily Record of Benton County, Ark., had the same problem:
At least that’s the new cast on the left. The interaction with the nameplate is quite nice. As is the one from today’s Kansas City Star:
Wonderful stuff. As is this one from the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Ga.:
This vector illustration atop page one of today’s Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader is very amusing:
Our favorite, though, is this one from the Victoria Advocate of Victoria, Texas:
Victoria — circulation about 33,000 — built some really, really interesting movie-themed pages last year, too. Read more about those here.
May 8th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I got agree, we shouldn’t have used the Enterprise from ST:TMP. Kudos to the Victoria Advocate for intergrating the Federation logo into their masthead, very inventive.
May 8th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
The one from Arkansas is too jumbled precisely because of the interaction with the nameplate. It’s fine to edge into your flag a little on occasion, but once you’re completely obscuring it I think it’s time to edit your design a little; maybe the whole bridge crew was overkill.
(Also, it’s a poor choice not to have Spock up there for obvious reasons.)
May 8th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
I liked the Pilot treatment, but having the big Enterprise right above the headline \Oceana jets likely involved in attacks\ was more jarring to me than using the wrong starship.
May 9th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Very nice toppers, but at the risk of sounding Knilands-esque…Both Kansas City and Benton County are way to nameplate covering for my taste. At some point your attention goes away from the teaser to what the resulting letters spell or what serifs are sticking out of ears and crotches. Plus as a designer my attention goes to what 12 layers that they had to employ in Photoshop to get a head in front of a letter but a body behind another, rather than the actual photo.
Live long and photoshop…..
May 10th, 2009 at 12:04 am
In the V-P’s defense, their headline complements the old enterprise/new cast image.
May 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Been meaning to put this up all weekend (couldn’t because I was laid up), but here’s what we did at Express. Just a note for context: This is the first time that anything special has ever been done with a movie page here. Before now, it was all simple pagination.
The cover, which has a much different treatment than some of the ones here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoicboy/3522707640/
The inside page with the review – I did the illo and layout:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoicboy/3522707704/
May 11th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I thought I was the first to reply 3 days ago, but since I invoked a certain Robert K….in my reply, maybe there is an automatic filter???
I had wanted to not sound like a crotchety word person, since I am not, BUT I have to think that the KC and Benton County examples are too much.
I like a nicely crafted teaser, but those two obscure the name so much, that I spend more time looking at the resulting letters than I do looking at the content. I also end up looking for Jay Leno-worthy serifs coming out of armpits or crotches, and wondering how many layers it took to get spaceships and people in the nameplate, but backgrounds and fades behind the text etc.