This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, March 11.
Talk about great moments in print newspaper design and here are two that do it best.
Not just what we think, but also what judges of the Society of News Design’s World’s Best Designed Newspaper category think.
We take great pride and congratulate the design teams of both Die Zeit and Memphis Business Journal for outstanding work. In both cases, our Garcia Media team was there at the start when the editors of these newspapers decided to go for a total visual transformation.
Readers of TheMarioBlog are already familiar with our work with Die Zeit—which I still cite as the most challenging of all my 700+ projects, but the one with perhaps the most successful outcome.
Die Zeit has been consistently named among the World’s Best Designed Newspapers and finds itself as winner and/or finalist in this category consistently.
It is, indeed, a thing of beauty: from the typography, to the use of color, space, illustrations and photography. It has superb content, too. Our own Garcia Media art director Jan Kny is now the deputy art director full time at Die Zeit (working closely with the talented art director Haika Hinze). Die Zeit has also evolved as a major digital provider of quality journalism, with a tablet edition that is one of the most popular in Germany.
Our hat off to the Die Zeit team.
More about Die Zeit here:
Case study: Redesign of Die Zeit
Die Zeit: the greatest evolution for a newspaper?
Memphis Business Journal
I am more than delighted to see the Memphis Business Journal, a local, regional, weekly newspaper among the finalists for the top SND Award. Way to go, MBJ team.
We at Garcia Media created the foundation and assembled the visual building blocks when we were charged with giving all the 40+ titles of American City Business Journals a new look in 2013
The idea was to standardize the typography, color and even the branding across all the titles—weeklies that cover local business news for their communities.
I worked closely with our art director at the time, Reed Reibstein, who is now in charge of product design at ACBJ, along with Jon Wile, ACBJ creative director. This is how the first of the ACBJ titles introduced the new look in 2013. It was the Silicon Valley Business Journal. This same type and color palette would be used across all the titles.
The best of Memphis Business Journal
A Q&A with the Memphis team
Greg Akers, editor-in-chief, Memphis Business Journal
• How has design improved your paper?
Design is inextricable from content as one consumes information. The
Memphis Business Journal takes pains to ensure the design and content
are perfectly wedded, informing and enhancing one another. We want our
stories to kindle as many of the reader’s senses as possible, so they
hopefully come away from a story feeling like it was an experience,
elegantly conveyed, that stimulated both emotions and intellect.
• What steps have you put in place for this to happen?
We have a team approach to producing the design and content of our
stories, particularly in our weekly print/digital edition. For our largest
features, we hold a meeting as far in advance of a deadline as possible,
often several weeks before and sometimes months, when the story is not
related to breaking news. We hold intense, intentionally brief sessions we
jokingly call “Death Panels,” where the author presents the story concept to
the designers and editors. Together, we dissect, poke holes in, and
otherwise try to improve upon the story idea, anticipating challenges not just
to the reporting but, crucially, to the final, designed product when it’s
published. Though it could simply be an exercise in brainstorming clever
headlines, or making sure there are no potential source or research
inquiries unturned, or photos or illustrations to get a jump on in production
— and it is all those things — what truly makes it worthwhile is having the
entire team, as equals, collaborate to elevate the work. Encouraging
writers, designers, and editors to see through each others’ eyes, even and
especially when it’s outside their background or skill set, to approach the
story empathetic and awake to its potential, we try to make our stories as
fresh, surprising, and engaging to the reader as our combined creativity can
produce.
“On a daily and weekly basis, Memphis Business Journal’s design team, Ian
Lawson and Brittany Seiveno, produce work that astounds me. It makes for a
fun newsroom and an extremely rewarding and gratifying work life. I basically
get to be like our readers, only a few days early: excited to see what the
process has come up with this time around. SND’s recognition is an outside
acknowledgement of the designers’ and newsroom’s considerable abilities and work. .”
Ian Lawson, Design Editor
Memphis Business Journal
What have you done to elevate your work?
My number one job is to try and elevate our stories and our products. I feel
like if I’m doing that to the best of my ability, the quality of my work –
pages/illos, etc. – will shine though. One begets the other.
· What changes have you made since you got to Memphis?
The biggest change is recognizing that I have to be, and that I want to be a
leader in the newsroom. I want people to know designers aren’t just here to
make things look pretty. We care just as much about story as anyone.
“When I found out we were a finalist for SND’s “World’s Best-Designed
Newspaper,” I was shocked. I still don’t think it has really registered. The
names on that list are giants in our industry and it is the greatest honor of my life to be among them.”
Here is a link for you to see full editions of the MBJ as entered into the contest:
Pre-order The Story now
The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Find out how, pre-orderThe Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.
Order here:
TheMarioBlog post #3007