Thursday was a day for large, unusual objects on A1
While making my daily sweep through the Newseum today, I was struck by a handful of unusual front pages.
The Chicago Sun-Times — circulation 275,641 — wrote about the nationwide tomato shortage with a larger-than-life vegetable (or fruit, depending on your culinary politics):
It must have been a strange day for Chicagoland commuters. For your El ride, you had a choice between the giant tomato or a giant Johnny Depp on the front of RedEye:
RedEye’s Trent Koland tells us he illustrated today’s front:
It was definitely a last minute kind of thing.
We wanted something out there and so I just went for it. I tried about six or seven variations on the same theme. Some with extreme crops, some without a teacup, some with a different facial expression. I just really wanted to nail the craziness of the Mad Hatter character.
And when we came up with the headline “Mr. Tea” it all seemed to fall into place. It’s a pity we could only run one cover because there were two or three versions in the toss pile that I really liked, too.
As much as I loved that, today’s Register-Guard of Eugene, Oregon, cirulation 67,400 really quacked me up:
The centerpiece was built by Craig Runyon — whose parents live right here in Virginia Beach, it turns out. Craig writes:
The story of Disney/UO Duck has some recent history.
In the run-up to the Rose Bowl, some UO students made a video that featured the UO Duck. It went viral in Eugene and the UO pulled rank saying the duck was a trademark of Disney and demanded to have it removed. The students complied, but it was already spreading like wildfire. Eventually, the students and UO struck some marketing deal and t-shirts and whatnot blanketed the area.
The story was pitched at yesterday’s budget meeting and there was a lot of buzz about it. Someone mentioned how similar Donald Duck and the UO Duck were, which made me think side-by-side comparison. I searched AP Images for a photo of Donald and found several staff photos of the UO Duck that would work. The UO Duck photo I went with had a little attitude — like many mascots do — so I tried to make it look like the he (it?) was shoving Donald out of the way.
The managing editor, Dave Baker, is very open to letting design lead the way so it wasn’t a tough sell when he stopped by my desk to see how the page was progressing. I wrote a working hed, “No longer ducks of a feather,” that ended up sticking.
Lastly, I thought this was an interesting way to illustrate a local angle on the giant earthquakes that have stricken Haiti and Chile:
The paper is the Telegraph Herald of Dubuque, Iowa, circulation 28,207. The photoillustration is credited to Dave Ketterling.