Did you realize this year — this week, in fact — marks the 175th anniversary of the start of the Siege and Battle of the Alamo?
I didn’t. But the folks at the Express-News of San Antonio — average daily circulation 130,566 — are right on top of it with an outstanding retro-themed treatment today.
Director of visuals Dean Lockwood tells us:
Basically, we’re doing “live” 1836-style newspaper coverage of every day of the siege (Feb. 23 – March 6) in the form of a daily spadea.
Click for a much larger view.
Dean writes:
The front of the spadea is designed in faux-1836 style by Adrian Alvarez.
Copy editor Robert Kolarik was tasked with becoming the 1836 “war correspondent,” writing a single news story from the scene each day. He really got into both the history and the windy/non-objective language of the day.
Here’s what Wednesday’s front page looks like without the spadea.
Dean writes:
The back of the spadea each day will be stories or ASFs on a variety of topics. [Today's back page is the] Coolest photo thing — an amazing slideshow of “Alamo as art” done by Billy Calzada solely as an iPhone/Hipstamatic project.
Dean continues:
Scott Stoddard designed today’s underlying front page and he’s also responsible for researching and designing a lot of the upcoming back-of-spadea ASFs. That guy’s a beast.
Here’s an interesting detail: The Express-News‘ daily recreation of the anniversary of the Siege of the Alamo will last 12 days. But the siege itself lasted 13 days. Why the difference? Dean explains:
1836 was a leap year. We’ll be doing an online-only “lost” page for Feb. 29.
On the final day, March 6, (happily that fell on a Sunday in 1836 and 2011) we’ll have a full-on front-page wrap. That will be a keepsake for sure.
And we’ll make room for it here in the blog.
Dean also points out there are cool parallel versions of the stories and visuals on the Express-News’ web site.
Very cool. Great idea! Of course, I’m a sucker for designing around history.