Acanac Inc. – a Toronto-based high speed internet provider – has been an advertising client of t.o.night Newspaper dating back to 2010 (I think…)

It’s definitely been a while – and though they tend to advertise a lot, they don’t really have anyone working on their creative end in-house… easily evident by the multiple ad variations that run across the various newsprint publications in the Toronto market.

The original ad we ran in t.o.night was essentially ripped apart in Photoshop and made to fit our page dimensions with no regard for the actual visual quality of the ad itself; polluted by more competing text than the human brain can adequately process in any reasonable fashion.

As such, I set out to give them a facelift.

Since they didn’t really have much of a budget at the time for creative concerns, we decided to run with stock art of an internet CAT-5 cable (since it was free); I altered the colour of the cable to orange to make it the dominant visual focus of the ad, but kept the clean blues and greys intact to maintain the company’s visual brand.

The multi-tone blue swoosh is a visual motif Microsoft and Rogers Communications have both been using as of late (the former in a much more integrated capacity), so I decided to run with that because of it’s wire/cable-invoking imagery.

For the past several months, t.o.night has been working on an iPad app so our commuting readership can still grab a copy of the nightly newspaper even if they happen to miss the physical copy.

The majority of our distribution thus far tends to occur between 3:30-6:00 as people in the downtown core leave their offices and head for Union Station – the bulk of this through our fleet of newsie handlers who physical hand the paper to commuters as they walk past, though additionally through our distribution boxes at most of the subway stations across the city and our underground PATH billboards.

The iPad app was a must-requested offering, and now commuters can read the day’s issue of the paper even if they happen to miss the handout period (because they’re commuting either before or after the timeframe) or reach boxes after they’re empty and haven’t yet been refilled.

Curiously enough, iPad apps are an entirely different monster than iPhone apps… both have to be coded separately and in some cases a large chunk of the code is not portable to the other platform even though they’re both developed by Apple – something I never even considered a possibility.

There were a few snags in the process, but ultimately everything worked out in the end – these are a few of the ads I built to run in the publication to advertise the new app. I designed the icon first (which also ended up in the App store) and then created a custom tonight iPad app logo. The blue/green circle I used as a highlight in some of the ads is a little reminiscent of the “loading circle” in Windows 7 that replaced the hourglass (or the beachball of death in MacOS) – kinda my little cross OS jab at Apple (for the uninitiated: as a custom computer builder and power user I’m not a fan of Macs).

One of our ad clients at t.o.night Newspaper – Cetero Research – has been running off and on with us for some time now.

With the start of the new year though they were looking to upgrade their creative to something a little fresher, thus it was up to me to rework their existing creative into something a little more to their liking.

As with most ad redesigns – the client had certain elements they wanted to maintain from the old ad; the graphic of the girl sneezing in particular. However, with their primarily colours being green and black, they were hoping for something a little more colour-rich than the simple white style they’d been running in the past.

Since the graphic of the girl cut off right at the hip, I used a slight swooping motif as a divider for the info and contact portions of the ad. After a few revisions they also decided they wanted to include a QR code, so the green/black swoop provided a good anchor for placing that element after-the-fact.

This month’s posters are brought to you by the letter “M” – for math.

February’s Silver Dollar gig poster came together rather quickly one night after dropping a triangle down on an empty document and playing with it… ultimately it ended up turning into a simplified mountain structure, while an additional series of them became triangular trees.

Continuing with this mathematical tangent, the February Rancho Relaxo gig poster ended up turning into an angle diagram where one has to “solve for x”, though if you’ll notice in red: y to the power of 4 = rock.

So “x” should be fairly easy to find, right?

Also: π = 3.14159…. but is commonly truncated to 3.14, which when reversed essentially spells the word pie in numbers… you’re welcome.

With t.o.night Newspaper we tend to steer towards the Google side of things as far as graphics go – I think their “do no evil” mantra resonates with our publisher John Cameron, though I suspect he also might profess a certain fondness for their all-encompassing business model.

I do know that one thing he’s really keen on though is their search page logo updates that showcase an extra playful side to the company – ranging from simple graphics that replace the letters in the company name with societal objects, to animated HTML5 interactive apps that allow one to play with the logo while browsing the web.

One such logo I’ve done for t.o.night is for the Chinese New Year – which features a green Asian-style dragon with red scales and multicoloured head tendrils. While i actually did build this LAST year (inspired by a hand-drawing sketch I found on Google Search [of all things]), I never did post it, so I’m doing so now to remedy that.

We introduced a new ad insertion style this week at t.o.night with the debut of the issue cover domination.

Since rolling out the black border on the cover (somewhat reminiscent of the iconic yellow border from National Geographic) we’ve been looking at a way to leverage that in terms of advertising.

The picture above shows the original mockup I did for CityTV (on the left) and the eventual live creative (on the right) which they designed in-house to advertise the premiere of the upcoming Fox-produced sci-fi action series Alcatraz. Features include a top 1/3 banner and 1/8 page bottom banner that build out into the 26pt black border around the trim of the page – there is also a subtle shadowing highlight on the t.o.night logo for when the top 1/3 section bleeds out underneath the logo itself.

I’m happy with the way this finally turned out – and from the sounds of it we’ll be getting more of these in the future. I just wish they’d integrated that bottom section into the border, rather than designed it as a separate banner piece… better aesthetic overall if they’d done that IMO.