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Jul. 19th Fine tuning: a redesign is not always the answer; Italy’s Il Secolo XIX shows us the way

I have worked with the team at Il Secolo XIX in Genoa, Italy for about 14 years. During that time, the newspaper has been redesigned twice. I remember that in our first redesign we had to create a sense of page architecture, new grids, introduction of color, new typography, and a sense of order; the second redesign, five years ago, took us to a narrower web, a review of page architecture, and a new system of page one navigation.

Enter new art director, Massimo Gentile, former design director of Folha de Sao Paulo, and now Il Secolo XIX is changing and evolving from week to week.

In the next two postings, I would like to show how this tweaking and/or transformation is aimed at giving more power to page one, creating a navigational system that sells the goodies in the feature sections, while devoting a column to headlines that readers MUST READ if they want to be fully informed.

The key, says Massimo, is “to have a good sense of hierarchy, and to go for bolder headlines.”

Notice how the Il Secolo XIX front page compared to the national Italian dailies when news broke of the China earthquake.  Larger photos, bolder headlines, showed the importance of the story.

WHERE IS MARIO? Enjoying my grandchildren at Belleair Beach, Florida; building castles in the sand (which last a few minutes up before the kids or the waves tear them down), watching the most spectacular sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico, and answering the type of questions that only 3 year old boys ask: Abo, why do seagulls dive to catch fish, then fly away? Where does the sun go when it melts into the sea? Stay tuned for the answers!

Posted by Dr. Mario R. Garcia