PaperSpecsGallery.com Presents: Good Night 2020

It’s no secret that 2020 left many feeling battered and bruised. In a playful effort to put that horrible year to bed once and for all, branding agency Push created a gift to provide their clients some much-needed comfort, and a little gentle reassurance that 2021 would be better.

The gift’s arrival was a dramatic one thanks to the large, intriguing oblong box in which it came. Emblazoned with the words “Good Night 2020,” it was printed 6-color (CMYK + Light Cyan + Light Magenta) on one side by our friends at Sundance directly on Oyster White corrugated C-flute cardboard using UV inks.

In addition to the bold Gold lettering, you can also see reflective stars and clouds – in short it is a gorgeous black night sky. After printing, the whole piece was then digitally die cut.

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Thoroughly intrigued, I opened up the top of the box–

–only to have a fabulous book all but leap out into my lap! This, it turned out, was because it had been jammed tightly inside against some kind of springy material. (More on THAT, later! ;-))

Between the volume’s rounded corners and chunky feel, there’s no question that this was a children’s board book. In this case fittingly modeled after Margaret Wise Brown’s famous: “Goodnight Moon.

The first hint that this is something much more sophisticated? The soft-touch lamination that’s not only been applied to the cover, but also to every single page! The front cover proclaims “Good Night 2020: A Push Bedtime Story” in Gold beneath a Gold moon and surrounded by Gold stars, all against a Black background.

And sure enough, opening the book reveals the story of 2020. However whimsical the 2-color art digitally printed here by Artifact Uprising on 80 lb. Verso Blazer  Digital Gloss Cover, it’s mostly a downer because it’s about the nightmare pandemic we all know so well. In other words, this is not a story to be read to children, or even grown-ups for that matter, unless you want them to stare at the ceiling all night long.

And that’s when it dawns on me – there must’ve been something ELSE in the big, big box this charming book came in.

Plunging my hand inside I feel something soft, something fluffy...wait, it is a full-size pillow! And not just any pillow, either. Printed in big letters on the front of the pillow case: “Push for a good night’s sleep,” which is surrounded by stars, the moon and the Push logo. On the back, a whole host of questions, suggestions and tongue-in-cheek sleeping tips accompanied by appropriately funny art. Both sides were screen printed by Real Thread with high-opacity, water-based inks.

This is easily one of the cleverest agency gifts I’ve seen in a long time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go to bed and pretend that 2020 was all just a bad dream.