Mario Garcia continues his march around the globe, on Wednesday unveiling the remade Sportstar, an Indian sports weekly published in Chennai by The Hindu. It's been redesigned and converted from a magazine to tabloid format.

N. Ram, the editor in chief, writes:

Our hope is that the radical design transformation, going hand in hand with editorial and production changes, will make your sports weekly more current, more up with the news and trends, more vibrant and varied, more informative and insightful, more fun to read. And it will be quicker to market.

The emphasis of the new design is on elegant, comprehensive, on-the-go packaging and presentation of feature articles and photographs of the highest quality. A new typeface that is young and bold (fonts drawn from the Stainless and Fairplex families), a vibrant architecture, better navigation and layering of stories, a clear and vibrant colour palette, and colour coding of all major sports are key features of the redesign aimed at making Sportstar elegant, exciting, and sportier, besides offering the advertiser better value and new opportunities.

From the Garcia Media news release (full text after the jump):

The Garcia Media team, with Annette Osterwald, from our Hamburg office, as art director, took The Sportstar and helped in its rethinking, working closely with editor Nirmal Shekhar and art director Brian Gaughan.

"The changes involved a total reevaluation of content, with special attention to navigation, and a color palette that is more in harmony with the Indian landscape," Mario Garcia, chief architect of the project said. "Annette and I tried to look at ways in which young sports fan could comb through the new Sportstar faster, guiding them to their favorite sport thru a color coding system."

>Sportstar reinvented [Sportstar]
>Sportstar dons a vibrant new look [The Hindu]

FROM MAGAZINE TO TAB: THE RETHINKING OF AN INDIAN SPORTS ICON

Indian sports fans have known it as a magazine titled The Sportstar since 1978, but today this icon of Indian sports journalism changes to a tabloid format, becomes newsier and more immediate, and drops the "the" from its title. Some things are the same, including the best coverage of cricket, the most popular sports among Indians.

The Garcia Media team, with Annette Osterwald, from our Hamburg office, as art director, took The Sportstar and helped in its rethinking, working closely with editor Nirmal Shekhar and art director Brian Gaughan.

"The changes involved a total reevaluation of content, with special attention to navigation, and a color palette that is more in harmony with the Indian landscape," Mario Garcia, chief architect of the project said. "Annette and I tried to look at ways in which young sports fan could comb through the new Sportstar faster, guiding them to their favorite sport thru a color coding system."

The Sportstar was launched by The Hindu Group as a tabloid weekly on July 15, 1978. It changed size to magazine format on September 6,1980 and has continued until the launch of the reinvented tabloid weekly Sportstar January 25, 2006.

Its recent base circulation has been around 50,000 a weekly issue but during major sports events (such as the football World Cup and the cricket World Cup) circulation can shoot up to over 200,000. It is the only sports magazine of its kind in English in India and has a surprisingly high estimated readership of 1.15 million (according to the last National Readership Survey, NRS 2005).

Sportstar's full-colour sports weekly covers all major sports and games of interest to a predominantly Indian readership. There is focused coverage of cricket, football, tennis, [field] hockey, track and field, golf, Formula 1, the Olympics and other mega . But, American and European readers may miss the fact that the tab does not cover baseball, rugby or American football!

The inaugural [1978] issue of The Sportstar was priced at Rs. 1.50 per copy and the magazine is now priced at Rs. 10 per copy. The reinvented tabloid 40-page Sportstar will be priced at Rs 8 per copy, with attractive half-yearly and annual subscription rates. "Given the excitement surrounding the reinvented Sportstar and given the attractive (newsstand and subscription) pricing, we expect a substantial rise in circulation quickly,: said N. Ram, publisher.

The Sportstar had an interesting ancestor, the weekly Sport & Pastime, published by The Hindu group between 1947 and 1968. It was a different kind of magazine in a different format. Its editorial content and production values were suited to the age in which it served its readers. Aside from sports, it covered film and other "pastimes."