An Orange Halloween

I love Halloween. I mean I *really* love Halloween.

And I’ve always thought it’s pretty darn fun when a newspaper goes a little crazy on that day. That was the plan this year at the Orange County Register.

One of the stories that’s always interesting to read every couple of years is what famous people in our hometown do on Halloween or what they hand out to trick-or-treaters. So, we did a version of that story this year in the Register.

And to make it feel even more “Orange County,” we wanted to have the amazingly talented Chris Morris draw some of our notables in homage to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts. The results were super cool:

Here’s how it looked on our front page (wonderfully designed by Chris Soprych):

And here’s how it looked on the homepage of ocregister.com:

To read this story on our site – and see our other Halloween coverage from that day – please visit this link.

(BTW – I also really love this Disney photo from a few years ago of an updated Hitchhiking Ghosts that includes OC’s Will Ferrell, along with Jack Black and Jason Segal.)

There’s something else you may have noticed on that screenshot of our website: the spooky illustration in the header of offices with ghosts flying around them. That was made by another great OCR designer, Anna Berken.

And it didn’t just appear on our website.

We knew we wanted to do something fun for each section front of our Halloween edition. Anna then made these awesome section tops that ran in Friday’s paper (Including the “Happy Halloween” ribbon that was on the front page):

These pages were filled with so much personality! They totally made me smile, and we got amazing feedback from our subscribers. I have always believed that a newspaper shouldn’t be afraid to wink at its readers from time-to-time.

Friday’s paper – with a ton of direction from AME/Visuals, Helayne Perry, and lots of creativity from the rest of the Register’s great newsroom – was filled with many tasty treats!