Each year, my newspaper produces a business card directory, a glossy brochure featuring mostly business-card size ads organized by category and distributed not only in a Sunday edition of the paper, but also through the local Chamber of Commerce.

This year, we had the opportunity to include two full-page house ads in the brochure, which I designed. One was for our sales team, the other for our design team. The ad manager told me I had creative freedom on both.

For the sales team, I found a background on Thinkstock. I liked how the gears fit together, suggesting working together. I had to add an extra gear so all of our sales reps would appear in their own gear, then copied the larger gears and resized them to show our various products.

The sales team ad won second place in the Best House Ad category in the 2016 Kansas Press Association Awards of Excellence.

The second one, for the design team, was a collaboration with my co-designer, Mallory. She’s a talented illustrator and when I saw a comic-book themed background on Thinkstock, I asked her if she could make us into superheroes. She loved the idea and we had some fun coming up with our alter egos and taking pictures in super hero poses. She then drew the uniforms and combined them with our photos in Photoshop.

For this ad, Mallory and I won third place in the Best House Ad category in the 2016 Kansas Press Association Awards of Excellence.