Charles Apple

OK, you know I often preach about catching readers off-guard. And you know I love messing around with the paper’s nameplate from time to time.

And you also know that I think the Virginian-Pilot does this better than anyone.

But the top of today’s paper really caught me off-guard, providing a huge laugh (click for a larger view):

Having the aliens abduct two letters from the nameplate was just genius. Genius!

You can’t do stuff like this every day. But occasionally — and when it doesn’t clash too badly with whatever your lede story is — I think it’s terrific.

Here’s the whole page:

And here are a few more examples of the Pilot playing around with the space above or around its nameplate or page hedders (again, click each for a larger view):

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 10:09 am and is filed under Innovative ideas, News design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.