The brief
The Lantern is a local newspaper for New Carlisle, Ohio, written from the public record: council packets, road notices, recalls, weather alerts and the data the town's institutions publish. Its stories are accurate and useful, but a paper made from records has no photographers, and stock photos kept showing the wrong place, a flood in another country under a local flood watch, a restaurant kitchen under a nursing-home inspection.
The paper needed pictures that belong to its own stories, in a look that is unmistakably its own, for every story it publishes.
What we did
We designed a house style first: bold ink line, big blacks, large figures, and a person in every scene, set in a real place with a real object in the foreground. No lettering anywhere in the drawing. Each picture gets one spot colour, chosen by the desk the story comes from, and that colour sits on one solid object, so the eye goes straight to what the story is about: the headlights in the fog, the door to the closed session, the recalled heater.
We then built the style into a system. Each new story is read for its subject and setting, and an illustration is generated for it with AI in that house style, checked automatically before it is published, and attached to the story. The picture is made for that story, not borrowed from somewhere else.
Every generated illustration carries a credit to Sunset Media, linked to this site, and the paper explains on its credits and standards pages how the illustrations are made.
The result
Since October 2026, every new story in The Lantern arrives with its own illustration, drawn for that story and in one consistent hand, whether it is a council meeting, a road closure or a product recall. The pictures make a page of public records read like a newspaper, and they make The Lantern recognisable at a glance.