TAKEAWAY: Today, the evening newspaper of Paris, France Soir, premieres a new look, perhaps with a more upscale look and feel than was there previously. We tried for this assignment and did some pages for the pitch, but obviously with different direction. Take a look.
A more upscale look for France Soir
Today’s front page of France Soir
It is a new look for France Soir of Paris today. The evening newspaper has undergone major design changes, carried out by Cases & Associates, of Spain. New editor of France Soir is Remy Dessarts, with whom we had the pleasure of working earlier on L’Equipe, the sports daily of France.
The new France Soir is apparently aiming at a more high brow readership. The France Soir that has existed till today is an evening newspaper with appeal to a more mass down market readership.
The front page that we have seen uses serif typography for all headlines and promos, with touches of elegance in the vertical navigator and the way pastel colors are used. Throughout this new France Soir, there are very elegant touches of typography and color, and even more use of white space between elements that this newspaper has ever used. Overall, an attractive look and feel for one of Paris’ most legendary newspaper.
This is interesting, as we were one of the consulting firms asked to pitch for this project. As many of you know, one common practice in the industry these days is to have the various consultants opting for the job to submit a variety of pages of how they would handle the job. In a radical departure of our usual policy of not showing prototypes that did not get produced, and in the spirit of continuing to use this blog as an educational forum for the discussion of storytelling and design, I have decided to show you our front pages for this project, the ones that were considered but not chosen.
In our briefing, we saw France Soir as a more popular and down market product, thus the use of red including for the flag. We also went with more of a sans serif type scheme throughout. Our front page emphasizes red and yellow, the new one in the street today goes for soft hues.
Who knows? Perhaps, during the course of this project, France Soir took a turn to becoming a more upscale daily. We promise a closer look as the pages become available.
Other details:The new France Soir will sell for 60 cents of a euro, and the expectation for the new design is that it will propel France Soir to selling over 100,000 daily copies. Presently France Soir has 76,000 daily readers.
For now, we think that the new France Soir is elegant and does the job nicely.
Here is the new front page of France Soir (far left) and two of our page one models when we pitched for the project
TheMarioBlog post #694