The Society for News Design recently announced their annual award for the best designed newspaper: i. It's a small paper in Lisbon, Portugal that looks a lot like a magazine. And according to the paper's former art director's Q&A with Charles Apple, that's at least partially because they use hot-press printing, like many magazines.
What I really loved from his Q&A was his advice to make newspapers better in the U.S. is to "just do it!" His point was that newspapers are a very temporary medium; often they just line the bird cages when people are done. So trying that new thing is really easy because people don't really remember when the screw-ups happen. I think this is important for us to remember as we're designing our prototypes because we're trying to do something the company has never done before.
In MadeByMany's Q&A with Darryl Ohrt, he emphasized the energy brought to his agency by re-branding. It's an interesting thought that something so time consuming and hard can also bring energy to an agency. But if you think about it, it makes sense. I always feel far more energized working on something compared to sitting in a class.
This reminds me of one of the sessions I attended at SND about how to make newspapers more like magazine (I don't remember if you went to that one or not.) While I think it's difficult to put out a daily product that looks like a magazine, I think there are a lot of aspects that can be included to hopefully boost sales and readership of newspapers.
ReplyDeleteI also blogged about this last week! It's totally fascinating and makes me hopeful for the future of newspaper design (and the possibility of jobs for print designers in the future!)
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