It’s important to remember that, for every front page that goes wrong, there’s another serving as an example of pure printing magic.

Hats off to the The Virginian-Pilot for today’s A1 page, which stops, collaborates, and listens to meld two separate headlines—one about freezing road conditions and another about a snow plow driver who helped a woman in labor get to the hospital—into a brand new invention.

The person behind today’s cover is Lisa Merklin, page designer for The Virginian-Pilot, who says the newsroom “had a great laugh about it.”

“I was really excited to run it,” Merklin says. “I thought, ‘They’re never going to go for it.'” But she got her first sign that it might just make the presses when “the news editor looked at me, and he didn’t look at me with revulsion.”

“We always like to get pop culture references in there,” she says. “Any opportunity I have to do that, I take it.” And it’s not just for its own sake—it’s a way to generate excitement and draw more eyes to the stories beneath the headlines, she says. “I like to tell people that designers don’t just make things pretty. We like to experiment and engage our readers.”

Merklin says she wanted both headlines featured “above the fold,” newspaper-speak for the upper half of the front page, to intrigue people who glanced at The Virginian-Pilot on display.

The daily newspaper, founded in 1865, largely serves Southeast Virginia with a daily circulation of 300,000. Something tells me more people than usual will be seeing today’s front page.

And here’s to Robert Matthew Van Winkle, aka Vanilla Ice, for the single that keeps giving.

Updated with comment from Lisa Merklin.

Filed Under: meanwhile in virginia, the virginian-pilot, vanilla ice,