Good newspaper design is all about effectively presenting large quantities of text/information in a usable, straightforward way. That’s got a lot more in common with good web design than most of the sexy print pieces you find in design magazines/annuals. Some places to check out winning newspaper design:
Best Front Design picks out a noteworthy newspaper cover each day and analyzes why the design works.
Society for News Design has an annual Best of Newspaper Design Competition (archives).
And NewsDesigner is a smart blog about newspaper design.
Matt Linderman wrote this on Mar 13 2007 There are 18 comments.
Geof Harries 13 Mar 07
It’s cool to see how interaction and information design concepts from the web have directly influenced traditional media such as magazines and newspapers. From the front-page to the masthead and editorials to archival references, print media has finally admitted that its learned a thing or two from us “geeks”.
JF 13 Mar 07
Great find, ML! Really cool site.
Ken B. 13 Mar 07
Tim O’Reilly just wrote a piece titled Journalism Through Computer Programming for the O’Reilly Radar that makes a good connection between journalists and programmers.
Andy Dietler 13 Mar 07
ESPN .com is the only website I’ve seen that does a good job of reformatting their main page with large pictures for large events and stories. It’s neat to see this newspaper style “big story” done on the web.
Pat Hall 13 Mar 07
Cool site!
I think (non-design) magazines are also a great place to look for design inspiration.
Magazine tables of contents, in particular, often have interesting little tricks that can be borrowed as navigation motifs.
Pat Hall 13 Mar 07
Cool site!
I think (non-design) magazines are also a great place to look for design inspiration.
Magazine tables of contents, in particular, often have interesting little tricks that can be borrowed as navigation motifs.
awardtour 14 Mar 07
From the Newspaper Design Competition, El Economista looks so damn nice. I would have been interested to see pages which contained advertising just to see how they balance the pages.
Paolo Sordi 14 Mar 07
Great link. And if you look at thise wonderful front pages and compare them with correspondant web home pages, well, I think that web pages (and web designers) still have to learn a lot in terms of usability, clarity and large quantities of text/information, don’t they?
Karel Thönissen 14 Mar 07
When will designers finally learn to use a date format that is unambiguous, particularly in an international context such as the web. The American standard of mm/dd/yy is bad enough as it stands, but the slashes at least warn the reader of the potential ambiguities. However, using mm.dd.yy is really off the mark, using the punctuation from other contexts that were unambiguous until now.
Content should never suffer from the looks.
-1 for Best Front Design.
VideoWebGuy 14 Mar 07
Another element to consider is Web 2.0 – ie. rounded corners and pastel colors that difuse to white.. This is what we see in the emerging community driven net.
Eric Puidokas 14 Mar 07
Another good place to find great newspaper design is at http://www.newspagedesigner.com/ . The site is a collection of newspaper designer portfolios.
Ken Rossi 14 Mar 07
http://www.newsdesigner.com/blog
Ken Rossi 14 Mar 07
News Designer
A blog about newspaper design along with screenshots to the daily front pages of major newspapers…
James D Kirk 14 Mar 07
I really appreciated this post, and the path it took me down. From the BFD site, to Brass Tacks Design and then to the special report by Newspaper Next about the future of the newspaper industry I was able to better conceptualize just what my friend and business partner has been telling me for some time, our company IS a media publishing company fueled by our readers and Contributing editors.
I guess I should have realized that it would be SvN that would clear the sleep out of my eyes ;)
Go Boldly!
Mike Swimm 14 Mar 07
While there are plenty of things to learn from print about easily and quickly conveying information, I think it is a shame that so many sites, and specifically blogs, look like they were designed for print.
We can do ANYTHING in terms of layout and design on a website.
Lets try to come up with some new ways to share and display information without reverting to hundred year old layouts based on the restrictions of antique typesetting equipment.
Rhea Paredes 14 Mar 07
Good writeup! I agree that the way information is structured in newspapers is a good place to draw inspiration. Thanks for the links too – I had fun looking at the BFD winners.
Tom P Schaafs 14 Mar 07
As the context is a fit: Mario Garcia giving a humorous and charming speech about the redesign of the Wall Street Journal for the european region. He tells and justifies the design decisions: http://www.typovideo.de/
Web 18 Mar 07
Ironically, speaking of design – on that snd.org page they are using images of White text against a lightish gray background
This discussion is closed.