Recently in Newspapers Category

The Daily Launches

The Daily Launches

The Daily, the much rumored iPad app from News Corp., officially launched today. Verizon is sponsoring a 2-week free trial, so you can get in there today and play around with it before the .99 cent weekly subscription kicks in.

News Corp Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch took the stage at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC Wednesday morning to unveil The Daily, thei newspaper designed specifically for the iPad.

Have you downloaded it yet? What's you're review? Let us know what you think. 
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Victoria Advocate's Special Tron Section

Victoria Advocate's Special Tron Section

Texas daily newspaper Victoria Advocate published a special Tron edition of their weekly Get Out entertainment section. Art directed and illustrated by Ryan Huddle, the section's eight pages connect together to form an uninterrupted series of photographs, stories, graphics, and a timeline. And it's all done in-house with movie stills and existing imagery.
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Cool Daily Newspaper Designs

Cool Daily Newspaper Designs

I recently attended the Society of News Design annual conference, held this year in Denver. SND is the newspaper equivalent of SPD, newspapers designers from around the United States and Canada, with a strong European and Latin American contingent. I gave a talk on how newspapers should adapt their design to look more like magazines, especially weekly magazines like Time, Businessweek, New York, and Entertainment Weekly. As part of my presentation, I solicited design samples from a number of art directors from around the country. I discovered some remarkable design happening in some out-of-the way places like Huntsville, Alabama, Victoria, Texas, and Norfolk, Virginia. We've already posted some samples from the Victoria Advocate and Portugal's i newspaper on the SPD site. Here are some other examples of outstanding, creative daily newspaper design.

(Left): The Columbus Dispatch, Columbus, Ohio. Art director: Scott Minister. (Right): The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Virginia. Designer: Sam Hundley.

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The Victoria Advocate's M3 Entertainment Section

The Victoria Advocate's M3 Entertainment Section

The Victoria Advocate is the second oldest newspaper in Texas, published in Victoria, a small town located in the Southeast part of the state, about 30 miles from the Gulf. The paper's M3 (Music, Movies, and More) entertainment section is distributed every Friday inside the paper and for free at select outlets around the city. M3's art director, Ryan Huddle, has created a remarkable body of work, with unique covers, special movie poster cover wraps, and entire themed issues. This is newspaper design at its best: bold, imaginative, original, and poster-like, with a direct visual connection to the readers. We've got nine great examples of Ryan Huddle's work at the Victoria Advocate, plus some comments by Ryan on how the pages came together. Unless indicated, all design and photo illustration is by Ryan Huddle.

(Above): Cover wrap for Twlight. Design and photo illustration by Ryan Huddle.
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Portugal's i Newspaper

Portugal's i Newspaper

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Society of News Design conference in Denver about the increasing confluence between newspaper and weekly magazine design. One newspaper that has a brilliant, magazine-like format and design is Portugal's i, a daily launched in May 2009. The initial design was by Javier Errea and Innovation Media Consulting; the current creative director is Nick Mrozowski, an American who previously worked as a designer for the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, and at Link, the paper's free alternative daily. i is designed with a magazine format, bold feature spreads, lots of illustration (even on the front page), and bright, innovative, engaging graphics. It's a smart, original, and creative newspaper, filled with visual inspiration. And best of all, i is not afraid to make visual statements, to excite and provoke with its design, graphics, and images. This is a publication that engages its readers every day in a strong, visual conversation.



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amNewYork: Newspaper covers for commuters

amNewYork: Newspaper covers for commuters

Christopher Sabatini has been the design director at amNewYork for most of its existence, since its launch in 2003. The free daily newspaper is given away at NYC subway stops and in news boxes around the city, and competes for eyeballs with another daily freebie, Metro New York. am New York publishes five days a week with a circulation of between 350,000-400,000, mainly in Manhattan. Their target audience is commuters 18-40 who don't read other newspapers.

Sabatini has given the covers of amNewYork a bright, sassy, tabloid feel, like a funner, hipper New York Post, complete with funky Photoshop constructions. It's all done on the fly, with no time and a very limited budget. The covers pop off the pages, grabbing commuters as they head into the subway. Sabatini says, "We see ourselves as the initiator of conversation with our readers, whether it's about the story of the day or about trends that New Yorkers are seeing or experiencing."

amNewYork's covers are all self-created and produced, usually with stock photography. They have that wacky, bespoke news magazine feel of alternative weekly papers like the Dallas Observer, Westword, and Riverfront Times. The design confronts myriad challenges, like multiple cover ads and limited production values, but it still comes off as smart, original, engaging, and full of passion, qualities we like and admire.

Sabatini gave us comments on some of his favorite cover designs for amNewYork.

Christopher Sabatini: (Left): November 17, 2008. I went away on vacation and designer Sara Baumberger and her Photoshop skills did this amazing cover. (Right): October 1, 2008. We have a small staff, and I try to give them a chance to do covers (or any other pages). This is another cover design and image by designer Sara Baumberger.
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Cleveland Newspaper Goes Big When LeBron Leaves

Cleveland Newspaper Goes Big When LeBron Leaves

The news of LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers dominated many newspaper front pages on July 9. But the treatment his hometown newspaper, The Plain Dealer, gave to the story stood out.  Designers Michael Tribble and Emmet Smith, directed by David Kordalski, executed a dramatic poster front focused on just one word: "Gone."

Smith describes the thinking behind the design, begun just eight hours before the page went to press, in an interview on Poynter.org: "I was of the thinking that Cleveland would really need to see a straight front with 'HE'S GONE' in 300-point knockout with a picture, but Michael kept pushing me to do something different, less 'boring.' When I brought him that cover, it was half as a joke, not thinking we'd be able to run it. But Michael loved it and was sure it was the right choice."

The Plain Dealer's unusual front struck such a chord with jilted Cavaliers fans that ESPN and the Associated Press wrote stories about it. After the jump, see what The Plain Dealer normally looks like and view other LeBron front pages from around the country.

This post was written by Reed Reibstein.

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Society of News Design launches newly redesigned website

Society of News Design launches newly redesigned website

The Society for News Design has relaunched and redesigned their website, SND is the newspaper association of "visual journalists," art directors, graphics people, etc. Their site is rich and energetic, and currently features a lengthy entry (with video!) by Roger Black on the future of news design, a post by Boston Globe design director Dan Zedek on year-end graphic coverage, and five questions with journalist and web developer Adrian Holovaty. Take a look and show them some love.
The graphic attack of The Dallas Observer

The graphic attack of The Dallas Observer

Alexander Flores has been the art director of alternative weekly newspaper The Dallas Observer for a little over two-and-a-half-years. In that time he has created a series of covers that stand among the boldest and most creative of any publication, anywhere. Working with a limited budget and deadline, Flores attacks the covers, using the images, logos and headlines as tools in his palette, crafting wonderful holistic visual products. He draws on his prior experience as an art director at local ad agencies, and essentially creates the entire cover himself, through creative typography, manipulation of stock photography, and his own illustration. Almost everything on the covers in this collection was done by Flores, who says, "If I can sit in front of the computer or a drawing board and create it myself, I will." This is state-of-the-art cover design. Take a look at the 10 we've got pictured below, and then visit here for over 100 more. 

Cover above: illustration by Noah Patrick Pfarr.   
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Nypost.com: A User-friendly Redesign

Nypost.com: A User-friendly Redesign

The New York Post's website, nypost.com, re-launched this past September with new features and a new design. Whether you admire the daily's vibe or just find guilty pleasure in PageSix, fans of user-centric web design will admire its user-friendly nature. I chatted recently with Nick Gould, CEO of Catalyst Group, the folks behind the new look and feel.… MORE
Newspaper Album Covers

Newspaper Album Covers

I've been listening to lots of old albums lately, especially from back in the late 60s/early 70s days. Of course, that was the golden album of rock album cover design, when no expense was spared, and no idea was too trippy. (And then of course, there were those gatefold covers, very useful at party time, or so I've heard...). One of the most popular design trends in those days was to create album covers that looked like newspapers, and not underground or alternative types, but regular old mainstream papers, which were not considered cool by any stretch of the imagination. So here, with no redeeming value, except pure fun, are some classics of the genre.



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TED TALKS: Jacek Utko designs to save newspapers


Worth a watch. With a background in architecture Jacek approaches newspaper design with a fresh perspective and some interesting numbers to back up his theories. As the last line in the summary of his talk on TED.com reads "Can good design save the newspaper? It just might." You be the judge.
Two BBC Video Shorts on the 'Paperless Paper'

Two BBC Video Shorts on the 'Paperless Paper'

The BBC has posted a short video interview with Dean Baker, manager at Plastic Logic. They're the maker of a super-thin electronic reader due out early next year. The video gives you a good sense of how the (still unnamed) product will look and operate.
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"New E-Newspaper Reader Echoes Look of the Paper"

There is a notable piece in the NYtimes today about a new electronic newspaper reader from Plastic Logic due out next year. It seems to be similar in many ways to the Kindle, but larger in size and looks to have the ability to display layouts.

While I don't own a Kindle, I was blown away recently when I sat next to a subway rider using one. The legibility was so good I could even read over his shoulder.

From the article ...

... "Even though we have positioned this for business documents, newspapers is what everyone asks for," Mr. Archuleta said.

The reader will go on sale in the first half of next year. Plastic Logic will not announce which news organization will display its articles on it until the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, when it will also reveal the price.

Read the full NYtimes article for more.


Alternative Newsweekly Design

Alternative Newsweekly Design

I recently gave a presentation to the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. There's some great design being done at those papers, ranging from super slick to down and dirty, almost all of it being done fast and cheap.

One of the best alt weekly designs is the Las Vegas Weekly. Their art director, Benjamen Purvis, uses a lot of design and typographic tricks to create a visual version of the noise, color and neon of Las Vegas, with plenty of 3D type and bold photos and graphics. It's wonderful stuff, super-sophisticated, in the design world of Esquire or Los Angeles, as good or better than what many national magazines with much bigger budgets are doing.


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"The Stranger" Cover Archive

One of my favorite online publication site trends is the creation of cover and issue archives. So I was very happy to find that the complete collection of Entertainment Weekly covers is now available on their website as part of a complete issue archive. There are over 1,000 covers, art directed by Michael Grossman, John Korpics, Geraldine Hessler, current DD Brian Anstey, and even a couple years art directed by myself. This is very cool stuff, some amazing photography, and it's fun to see how the EW cover has evolved over the years. It's also a wonderful snapshot of popular culture since 1991.
Even better, The Stranger, the alternative weekly based in Seattle, has posted the last 10 years of their covers. The Stranger covers are like the cool punk version of The New Yorker, with illustrations, photographs and graphic design that are stand-alone visual statements, with lots of attitude and passion. Like The New Yorker, The Stranger covers are the visual voice of the publication, a dialogue each week between the paper and its readers.
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« February 2011