Does anyone get tired of reading about inventive design director Ryan Huddle, his wife, features writer Aprill Brandon and their antics on the pages of the Advocate of Victoria, Texas?
Me, neither. Their stuff is funny, it’s fresh and it’s a great example of the kind of attitude we all could be bringing to our newspapers.
The subject for today’s M3 entertainment tab was tattoos — a topic we’ve all done ad nauseum. There’s simply no way Ryan and Aprill could find a fresh angle on this story, right?
Wrong.
Yeah, Aprill got herself tattooed. For the story.
Ryan tells us:
Unfortunately, the newspaper did not pay for the tattoo. But I tell you, that girl will do anything for a story.
While she was getting the tattoo she was conducting her interview with Gail, the tattoo artist. I got the who thing on film.
The Advocate won’t let me embed the video. You can watch it here, though.
Here is the cover of today’s M3 entertainment section. Click for a larger view:
Ryan says:
I can’t really explain the cover, except I got the idea from Norman Rockwell but wanted to do something a little more with the expressions and attitude.
Here’s the main story, written by Aprill:
And here’s a look at popular tattoos and where (on the body, not locations of artists) to get them. Again, click for a larger view:
Ryan writes:
I came up with showing a guide to popular gattoos using a paper doll and making the tattoos we are talking about look like you can cut them out and put on the doll.
Interestingly, Ryan — whose background is in advertising, as opposed to news — has never seen the famous celebrity tattoo pages published years ago by the Asbury Park Press:
Harris Siegel‘s APP work was fun and fresh. Ryan and Aprill’s work is a worthy successor to this piece.
Here’s Aprill’s first-person story about the tattoo.
And, of course, when you talk about permanent tattoos, you also have to talk about making them unpermanent, too:
When you go to all this trouble to cover all the aspects of an interesting trend story, then you have to promote it properly. Not only did Ryan build a nice top-of-the-page skybox refer but the Advocate also ran an A1 centerpiece story on the trend of tattooing, complete with examples of local folks (again, click for a larger view):
Average daily circulations for the Advocate is 33,549.
Other cool stuff from the folks at the Victoria Advocate:
- A ‘who’s who’ of vampires for the new Eclipse movie.
- A cool ‘totally wicked awesome’ 1980s game board treatment.
- A blueprint treatment for this year’s Iron Man 2 movie.
- The teenage-themed vampire movie New Moon.
- A taste-test for local cheeseburgers.
- Last summer’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
- A page-topper for last summer’s Star Trek movie.
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (scroll down a bit).
- Also from two years ago, The Dark Knight. (Scroll down for that one, as well. And then click here for more.)
- For Halloween, the Advocate produced a musical starring reporter April Brandon: Chupacabra: The Musical.
- Find a lot of additional movie treatments from Victoria here.
