Montreal New Years Eve 2010 :: the Blog

I’ve been quite interested in newspaper graphic design lately, and just I realized I had forgotten to post the link to last year’s New Years Eve guide by the Montreal Mirror, so here goes their NYE guide just in case. What’s interesting is their cover page art, see a small version bellow (I couldn’t find a larger image)

And here is the cover page for the NYE guide section:

Now compare that to the cover of 2006 and also to the cover of the actual NYE guide in 2006.The first thing that comes to my mind is that the graphic design for the 2008 issue is fairly similar to the design of the 2006 one: the newspaper’s cover page is a cartoon-style drawing and the cover of the NYE guide is a collage of promotional photos of some of the new years events.

Repeatedly using a graphic design is only a good idea when the design is a proven winner concept, and I am not sure that it is the case here. But I can definitely say that there has been improvement in 2008 vs 2006. The comic-styled cover of 2008 is much better, with an interesting play of colors on a catchy naive-art styled cartoon drawing. As for the inside photo collage, I would say that it is the weak point: collages are easily made boring and hardly made interesting. At least the 2008 edition features some provocatively positioned women, an improvement on the ski-masked faces of 2006.Maybe a crazier/richer photo collage would be best for 2009. Given that I am a nobody and the staff of the Montreal Mirror definitely does not read this blog, my suggestion will probably not be taken into account.

The enormous party Bal en Blanc has nothing to do with New Years Eve, but I want to talk about it because its simply so big and it’s been happening for so many years now, that I simply can’t ignore it anymore. I’ve personally never been to Bal en Blanc, and that’s mostly because I don’t understand where the fun is in going to a massive, commercial-organized rave party.

First, I thought raves were something of the 90ies and early this millennium, who the hell still goes to those?

Second, I thought raves were all about being underground and secret and organized in abandoned factory buildings or military radar sites in the country-side. A rave organized by a corporation in a big public space is like going to see an Eagles concert nowadays: true, it’s for the fans, but we all know it’s lame and it’s driven by the big money machine behind it.

Anyways, I am in a mood to rip into Bal en Blanc, and I guess I am allowed to. It just doesn’t seem like a genuine party to me.

What I liked though, is the advertisements they used for this year’s party. It’s kind of freakish in a way, actually very freakish, but it sure does attract the vieweres attenction. Good job to the big marketing company that the Bal en Blanc machine has employed for creating its propaganda this year.