Recently in Newspapers Category

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.… MORE

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

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 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

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

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.… MORE

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

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

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. … MORE

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