There are versions with ads. We all had the same brief. Front with ads and without ads. Here you see the version without ads.

Must say that the clear brief also creates space to do this.

One thing I am missing is advertising space. Or at least how a spread with ads looks. I understand that in an ideal world there is no advertising but that is not reality.

Thanks for the insight.

peace,

Lowman

You can get an idea if you search on Google Image Search for “nrc.next”

For instance: 1. The missing ads: It’s not so much that they’re missing, as that a lot of the designs seem actively anti-ad. I can understand why they’re not there if the brief specified it, but neither is it obvious how a lot of your pages could be easily recast to include them.

1. I understand the principle. It’s generally understood in newspapers too: the page lead will usually be top-left, if it isn’t the entire top. But you don’t set out the page to read as a progression along the Z — otherwise why read to the bottom. You design it for serendipity and relation. Not “This is most important, then this, then this”.

More importantly, it seems to fall into the trap that even many print designers make of saying that “stories will be as long as the design requires”. But what if you have a very important story that can only be 300 words long (perhaps for legal reasons)? If it’s up at the top left, then a 700-word unimportant story down the page is going to look ridiculous.

And what about edition changes? What if an important story comes in after first edition, and the page has to be remade to include it? If it’s important, does that mean redesigning the entire page, perhaps in as little as 40 minutes?

1. Of course you had to be able to do a five-column pic. But no strapline above it and so much wasted space in the photograph (I like it aesthetically, but a words-orientated editor is just going to see the 300 words that nice brown drape is costing him) and the ignorance of the fold does make it feel pretty-but-amateur.

2. I imagine this was part of the presentation, too? It’d certainly be the first worry of any production editor in the room.

5+7. It is the reader I’m concerned about when I talk about folding and leading and so forth. Designs that ignore the actuality of the printed product are actively reader-hostile, and that’s unfortunate. (Worth considering, perhaps, that you were trying to sell to the editor, however).

1. The missing ads are not missing. We did variations with ads. This was a very detailed pitch. Everybody had to do the same things.
2. The top left to bottom right (or Z-shape) order is both a principle of application design and graphic design (when dealing with big formats like posters) as it mirrors our basic reading direction.
3. The full width pic: That is just one application. Of course, our layout allows square long whatever format.
4. The Blue links: We actually printed the sample on their industrial printing machine and asked the guy in charge how realistic it is to do what we plan to do.
5. Usability was all we thought about. I spend half an afternoon reading a newspaper blind to see how it feels and study the motoric logic. We spend lunch time pantomiming with the team how newspapers are read.
6. After designing 8 news products with comments I know pretty much what comments can be expected from online news readers.
7. And yes, we very consciously optimized for the reader not for the editor or for some old priciples steming from the way newspapers were printed back in the days due to technical restrictions (mosaic order).

• The full-width picture: Papers can do this, and often do for specials, but for a mostly-empty picture of Obama they’re not going to sacrifice all that space above the fold. When the paper’s folded on the newsstand, all you can see is the masthead, some small type at the top and a picture. You can’t even see the splash headline. Compare how much the winning design has above the fold, for instance.

• The blue links: Anyone who’s ever printed on a newsprint press will tell you that the registration is more a hope than a promise. They’ll wander about, breaking the reader’s eyesight and concentration even more than they would if they were in line.

• The loose columns and leading: Newspapers don’t have much space for news. Sometimes it’s down to as little as 8 or 9 pages. But everyone in editorial wants to get as much news in as possible. When you waste space as you’ve done here, you waste the only thing the newspaper really cares about. On top of that, reading at smaller point sizes on a moving page (in the subway, for instance) is vastly easier with a) serifs, b) narrow columns, c) tight leading.

• Order: You don’t give a reason for the top-left to bottom-right thing, so it’s hard to justify it. News pages are built around the space left by advertising, and are geared to put compatible things together and to guide the reader around the content. Forcing the daily designer into an “importance grid” is just going to hinder them. And make for an unedifying experience when the paper is folded (again, for the subway).

• Usability: Just to bring this out into the full, you don’t seem to have considered how people actually read physical newspapers — at tables, at desks and on trains. Very rarely do papers get spread out full-size: they get folded up and flipped around. But your pages hinder this: the loose leading and big type means there are fewer words per page or section of a page, and some of your articles, like the opinion page, wander back and forth above the fold. They’re unnecessarily making life hard on your readers.

• Reader comments: Firstly, newspaper websites only have dreadful comments. Secondly, if you’re running them a day late, there’s no guarantee there’s going to be a companion article, so they’re going to seem lost and irrelevant.

Much respect for brining web knowledge to the idea and the pitch, however, and a lot of newspaper design could do with fresh thinking too. I especially like the new mark. But this is an area — like the technical side of photography, for instance — where not knowing the “rules” isn’t ground-breaking, it just hinders you.