Judges at the recently judged Society for News Design's 2005 Creative Competition awarded six Gold awards, NewsDesigner.com has learned. SND defines a Gold as an "award granted for work that defines the state of the art. Such an entry should stretch all limits of creativity. It should be impossible to find anything deficient in a gold-winning entry. It should be as perfect as humanly possible. Very few of these awards are given. Judges were asked to be very selective and look for total perfection in awarding a Gold Medal for the category entered."

Gold award winners are:

Die Zeit
Special Coverage/Sections/Multiple Sections with Advertising (Category 10Bb)
Leben sections on parenthood
(more images after the jump)

San Jose Mercury News
Special News Topics/The Athens Olympics (5A)
(more images after the jump)

Indigena
Feature Design/Entertainment Page (7Cc)
John Holmes page
(best image available; the hands are not part of the page, but the person holding the page; a full, more amusing version of that image here)

Cleveland Plain Dealer
Special section cover (10Ca)
ABCs of investing

Los Angeles Times Magazine
Portrait Photography (17E)
A life in the balance portrait

The Globe and Mail
Use of Photography (17L)

More images after the jump and tk, I hope.

San Jose Mercury News

Die Zeit

Peter Palazzo, the art director whose redesign of the Sunday New York Herald Tribune in 1963 helped to create the discipline of newspaper design, died at 78 on Jan. 30.

Steven Heller writes in today's New York Times:

In 1963, when Mr. Palazzo was hired to reformat the foundering Sunday edition of The Tribune, most newspapers were rigidly, and often blandly, composed by editors who were not trained as designers or art directors. Originally an advertising designer, Mr. Palazzo was asked to create a typographic format that would distinguish The Tribune from its competitors. He broke with tradition when he combined newspaper layout principals and magazine display presentation, including larger images, increased white space, and elegant headline composition.

It was a calculated risk.

"One must be very careful about tampering" with the readers' habits, "which have built up over a long period of time," he wrote in 1964 in Print magazine. But since The Tribune had been steadily losing Sunday circulation to The New York Times, Jim Bellows, editor of The Tribune, took a chance that Mr. Palazzo's concept to design all the Sunday sections for "individual identification and unified appearance" would transform the archaic-looking pages into something modern that would attract new readers.

On the front page, Mr. Palazzo replaced the conventional news stories, set in monotonous narrow columns, with a summary of world, national and local events in a wide column of type with bold subheading down the left side of the page. Wider columns and gutters (the spaces between columns) throughout the paper made it more legible compared with the tightly packed eight columns of type in The New York Times of that era.

Mr. Palazzo used only one typeface, Caslon, because "of the instant impression of integrity it gives to the news," he wrote. The photographs were also noticeably larger. The new modular design was so airy that readers initially complained that they could not take it seriously. But prefiguring responses to today's information glut, The Tribune's design provided readers with signposts that guided them through the paper.

In his book "The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune," Richard Kluger writes of the 1963 remake:

Until then, most newspaper editors' idea of page design began and ended with the question "Where shall we put the picture?" The new Sunday Tribune was conceived as a graphic totality, rendered with the precision of superior magazine advertising design. Each page reflected what the Columbia Journalism Review, in a favorable assessment of the restyled paper, called "painstaking 'packaging'" Type was massed and set off by white space almost scandalously generous for newsprint pages to create what the newly hired design editor, Peter Palazzo, called "an environment of visibility." Illustrations of unprecedented sizes, shapes, and originality, closely integrated with the text instead of mere window dressing, helped generate visual impact without sacrifice of clarity or dignity.

Today's the 60th anniversary of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, and Greg Williams, art director for design at the Tampa Tribune, has found an interesting perspective on the event. It's been known that there were two similar images of the event: AP photographer Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning shot (right) and a frame from Marine cinematographer Sgt. Bill Genaust's footage capture the same instant in time. And since the photographers were standing side by side, the Tribune realized something that apparently no one else had:

By juxtaposing Rosenthal's photograph with the matching frame from Genaust's film, it is possible to produce an authentic 3-D image of the Iwo Jima flag-raising.

For the first time, we can see one of the most iconic moments in U.S. military history with a real sense of depth and spatial relationships.

The 3-D effects are not the result of digital manipulation or computer trickery. They are based on the same photographic techniques that have been used to produce stereoscopic imagery for more than a century.

A 3-D photograph allows the viewer to see a single image from two slightly different viewpoints, mimicking the natural separation of human eyes.

>Dimensions of Valor [The Tampa Tribune]

SND has announced the World's Best Designed Newspapers portion of the contest. They are:

Die Zeit, Hamburg, Germany, circulation: 450,000
Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin, circulation: 150,000
Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm, circulation: 189,000
The Hartford Courant, circulation: 250,000
Marca, Madrid, circulation: 386,413

Die Zeit has probably been on the list the most, also making it in 1998, 1999, 2001 and 2002.

I'm happy to see Marca, one of my favorites, on the list. The judges especially noted their display after March 11 (shown above).

The rest of the awards, which were judged separately by different judges, should be announced in a few weeks.

There is a VisualEditors.com discussion thread underway here.

Congrats to all!

>World's Best-Designed Newspapers™ for 2005 [SND]

The judging of the 26th Society for News Design contest begins this weekend in Syracuse (forecast: Cloudy with snow. Cold. High 18F. Winds WNW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of snow 90%. 3 to 5 inches of snow expected), and Jay Small (aka the SND International Web Desk) will be blogging live from the judging. They've enabled comments on the weblog entries, so it should be an interactive affair. They will not, however, tell you if you won anything, consarn it.

The Chicago Tribune today introduces a subtle update of their headline typography. As the Trib was preparing to roll out its redesign in 2001, editors realized that the new headline face, Tribune Century, needed more work, but couldn't fix it in time for the redesign. So they asked Nick Shinn to re-cut it for help. The result is Tribune New Century Bold, which has a taller x-height, bigger counters, finer serifs and is better proportioned. The Trib is using this new font to replace several weights of the old font on news pages.

Click for a closer look

Steve Cavendish, an art director at the Trib, says:

"Will the average reader be sending us letters? Probably not. They're just subtle refinements, but we think they're pretty important and will make us better. The Trib is still a Century paper and will be for the forseeable future (translation: until well after my retirement)."

Also, sources tell me that in the last few weeks, the paper has moved to using more "window shade" previews (as on the Wednesday front) above the flag in the daily paper, something which previously had only been done on Sundays.

And that's the latest installment of Obsessing Over Newspaper Minutae (see also the stunning revelation L.A. Times Adds Vertical Rules!!!)

*Update: Stacy Sweat clarifies that Shinn did not re-cut somebody else's typeface, but based Tribune Century New Bold on his Worldwide face.

(Thanks, Stacy and Steve!)

Get a load of this Argentinian newspaper the VisualMente folks found. Included in the lineup of those responsible for the assassination eight years ago of photojournalist José Luis Cabezas is, well, Krusty the Clown.

>Krusty es culpable [VisualMente]

Back in the '90s, The Washington Post's Sunday Style section had a feature called "The Ear No One Reads," wherein humorous little sentences were run in an upper corner of the section's front page. The Edge (The Oregonian's Tim Harrower-created humor column) last week dug up a website, Gopherdrool.com, that has archived the ears. Some of the favorites:

"This is the First Page of the Rest of Your Newspaper"

"What Are You Looking Up Here For?"

"When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a Metro Section"

"How's My Editing? Call 202-334-4312"

"If U Cn Rd Ths Msj, Bg Dl"

"Help, I'm Trapped in the Typesetting Machine"

"Next Week, This Will Be Really Clever"

"Avoiding Clichés Like the Plague"

"Caution: Page Opens Out."

"Integrity First. We Are Not For Sale. Classifieds, Page F10."

"Fashion, Leisure and the Occasional Grisly Murder."

"We Have Fonts We Haven't Even Used Yet"

"This Week's Special Feature: Needlessly-Hyphenated Words."

Spanish heartthrob designer Rodrigo Sanchez of El Mundo's Metropoli gets pulses racing at VisualMente, a new Spanish-language design weblog by Dolores Pujol and Norberto Baruch B. Of last week's Clint Eastwood cover (with illustration by Ra�l Arias) they say:

Today, again, Rodrigo Sanchez demonstrates to us that all is not lost in the city of fury, with the new cover of Metropoli. When nobody seems to be able to awake from the eternal dream of daily mediocrity, our superhero appears and the visual battle is, again, won. At least, for one week. (Thanks, brother)

Without a doubt the main thing at the time of creating a cover is the idea. The I-D-E-A. But the idea is not only the idea. The idea is also how to do something one way and not another or its opposite. The idea is a color, the idea is a structure of elements, a syntax of forms, letters and images. Here the idea is the form. ...

We must cause the reader to dedicate more than 4 seconds of contemplation of the cover. If it is necessary we give him 4 minutes. And, if it is possible, we give him a lifetime to think about it and try to find out what it is we tried to tell him. ...

By the way, the covers are thrown away the next day or wrap fish. The ideas remain beaten in the walls.

>El paladín de la Justicia vuelve a volar sobre la Metropoli [VisualMente]
>El toro tuvo una idea [VisualMente]

OK, everything seems to be pretty much in order. There are lot more front pages over there on the left, many of which you will not find at the Newseum. Some of them may display a bit funky in some versions of IE. For this, Bill Gates is very sorry. Some older archive pages may also look funky until I get around to tweaking some image sizes in them. For this, I am very sorry. The rotating slogans up above the nameplate there are various newspaper mottoes, some now extinct. If you've got any more, send 'em my way.

Bear with me over the next several hours as I rearrange the furniture and install some new carpet around here. So if something's busted, that's why.

Portland Press Herald Editor Jeannine Guttman on Sunday recapped 2004 (which included a June redesign) and set out the newspaper's goals for 2005, which, after all, is only 12 percent over. One of the paper's goals, she says, is

... to improve the newspaper content to maintain and grow readership from 2004 levels for daily and Sunday.

Here's how we'll do that. We will develop a "visual culture" in the newsroom, furthering our 2004 redesign of the newspaper. This visual culture will move our new design forward, make stories more accessible to readers, accentuate the news value of our newspaper and make our journalistic presentations more compelling and useful. We have appointed a newsroom design committee to monitor the new design, provide feedback to the news staff and build upon our successes.

>Big gains and new goals [Portland Press Herald]

Earlier:
>Portland's redesign [NewsDesigner.com]

For more pages from the big game, check out SportsDesigner and the expanding list of links from Tim Ball at VisualEditors.com.

The LA Times' Sunday Opinion section has been trying some bold things lately. The section covers of Jan. 16, 23 and 30 all featured full-page cartoons by JibJab, Mark Alan Stamaty and Roman Genn. The Feb. 6 cover scales it back a bit, but still features a sizeable strip by Stan Mack.

On Jan. 30, after the third straight full-page illo, former Timesman Kevin Roderick wrote:

Looks like the full-page JibJab cartoon on the front of the LAT's Opinion section two Sundays ago wasn't the bold stroke and clever visual play it seemed. Turns out it was just the beginning of another (yawn) predictable design format. Today's cartoon by Roman Genn is fine as a work, but the conceit of devoting the entire front page to a one-note illustration feels tired after three straight weeks. Now that I expect it, the splash of color doesn't pull me into Opinion. Instead, it telegraphs nothing new here. It smacks of space filler, like the giant photos in Outdoors, and that's bad in a section that is supposed to lure you with the allure of its ideas.

Instead of coining a new design cliche, why not pick their spots and surprise readers with a really good cartoon or illustration a few times a year? If they must do a giant cartoon every week, and won't move it to the back page, at least shrink it to a half-page. It would still be the largest graphic in the paper all week, but then the editors could really have fun on the cover with catchier headlines, teasers, other graphic devices�maybe even, you know, a particularly smart thought or idea piece.

LAT Deputy Managing Editor Joe Hutchinson says of the changes:

The Opinion section at the Los Angeles Times is going through a metamorphosis of sorts. The past three weeks we used a single illustration as the entire cover - but this is not something we're going to do every week from now on. It's part of the experimentation process leading up to a redesign and rethinking of that particular section. The different approach has given us an opportunity to try something completely different and gauge reactions by our readers and our staff. We will continue to work on creative and inventive ways to get our readers thinking and talking, since inspiring thought is really one of the things an opinion section should do.

The Times has run four letters on the section that I can find online, all negative, like this one.

In the Jan. 23 edition, I count almost one-third of the section constituted of cartoons. I like to read the funnies about as much as most people, and I think Michael Ramirez's offerings are great. But I don't read Opinion to read cartoons. You are diluting your otherwise sober and valued presentation by putting half-page, let alone full-page, cartoons in the section.

(Thanks to Michael Whitley for page images, etc.)

Mediabistro has some new interviews with magazine design folks up, including Roger Black. He has interesting things to say about redesigns, reader ownership and newspapers throwing out history with their typefaces.

There is a certain kind of magazine that really owes it to itself to have some kind of continuity, and people forget that. I have said this a hundred times, it's not sinking in: The real owners of a magazine are its readers. If you are a subscriber to, say, Newsweek for 20 years, you really think of it as 'my Newsweek' and changes to the magazine are sometimes not very welcome. If only they would consult you—sometimes you've been there longer that any of the staff.

Newsweek is a good example. I did a redesign of Newsweek in 1985, and I did two or three others after that. In 1985, we tried to build on some core memory on what Newsweek should look like, which was a little rougher. I thought of it as a little tabloid, although I never said that to them. It should be more popular, more liberal, more fun, more unpredictable, you know… rougher. I think it came out very well, and, in any case, it coincided with the big shift between Newsweek and Time. So [then-editor] Maynard Parker had me redesign it again, in a serious way, and then he had problems with the art director, and I came back in and art directed the magazine as a consultant for a short time. When Maynard died, I didn't really have the heart to work on it anymore, it was too upsetting. Then my successor changed it dramatically and threw out the typeface that I originally put in, even though it had been there for years.

It's like when the Times of London threw out the typeface Times Roman. Now, maybe it was becoming generic—I mean, every printer in the world had their typeface on it—but, my God! It's called Times Roman for a reason! Make it work for you!

They could have taken their design and kept that equity. They've changed it since then, too. Why didn't they go back to Times Roman? It's the same thing if you're talking about American newspapers. The Boston Globe had a beautiful typeface called Madison that was originally their staple typeface, that [famed typographer] Matthew Carter had redrawn for them. Nobody else in the Unites States—or maybe in the world—used it. It was distinctive, very Boston for some reason, very apropos to the history of the Globe, to the whole thing. And then, for some reason, a new editor came in and cleared that out and put in Miller, which is a very fine typeface that Matthew Carter did, but sadly, it's used by everyone in the world. It's all over the place, particularly under the name Georgia. They took something out that was their own. I had the same problem with The New York Times throwing out Bookman and Trade Gothic.

And on a related note, the good Mr. Black was kind enough to comment on last week's Examiner eagle post, clarifying a point about the provenance of said eagle, so don't miss that.

The Reno Gazette-Journal (Gannett, 66,400 daily) launched a redesign last week, the first one in 15 years.

The redesign project was launched by the Gazette-Journal�s news staff nearly two years ago. An internal redesign committee consulted with a variety of national design experts, studied the design of many leading national newspapers and magazines and met repeatedly with local readers in an effort to refine the look of the paper.

Internal �prototype� pages underwent dozens of alterations before the basic structure of what you see today was presented to various groups of readers, including longtime subscribers and recent newcomers to Northern Nevada.

�The readers who came in and reviewed the pages were essential to the process,� said Jim Sloan, a senior editor for projects in the newsroom. �If they didn�t like something, they told us.

�But they liked these pages. They said they felt like they were reading a more relaxed, more informative newspaper.�

Guidance from readers led to several key changes to the newspaper � including the decision to compile all local news in the A section and launch the new Nation & World section, Sloan said.

The new design will emphasize local news on page 1 but also allows news editors to fully explore world events � both on the front page and in the Nation & World section. New �above-the-flag� features at the top of the front page will alert readers to special stories inside the paper, and on the weather page there is a new guide that will alert readers to stories scheduled to appear in the next few days.

>Major redesign goes hand in hand with updated Web site [Reno Gazette-Journal]

(Thanks, tball!)

Savannah Morning News Managing Editor Dan Suwyn has resigned to "pursue other interests."

Suwyn was known for his commanding eye for design and deft touch with editing. He gained a reputation in newspaper circles for his innovation with story approach and newsroom organization.

"Dan has been instrumental in developing both the investigative and civic journalism that connects us to our community," Executive Editor Rexanna Lester said. "We are grateful that he shared his writing, editing and design talent with us in addition to his sense of humor."

>Morning News managing editor steps down [Savannah Morning News]
>More changes in Savannah [Visual Editors.com]

So The Examiner's got a big honkin' version of their Jim Parkinson nameplate eagle on their opinion page. It's slightly different than the one on the cover, though (well, besides being only half an eagle).

Look at what's in the eagle's talons on the opinion eagle (top). No wimpy olive branches there! Who says eagles don't have opinions?

*Update: In the comments, Roger Black, who redesigned the Examiner back in the Hearst days, points out that, although the nameplate is Jim Parkinson's, the eagle isn't.

The Washington Post began zoning its front page for Virginia, Maryland and D.C. on Tuesday, the day the Washington Examiner (which zones its front the same way) debuted. Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said the move was "not exactly" coincidental.

"The fact that the Examiner itself has a zoned front page certainly made it a timely time to do it," Downie said.

He said the paper had been discussing the change for many months.

The Post also increased the size of a front-page box that highlights stories inside the paper, amplifying it to about one-third the paper's bottom half.

"It was a pretty decent debut issue," said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. "It looks and feels like a real newspaper as opposed to a cheap giveaway. I didn't see a whole lot of original reporting, but it was smartly packaged."

The longer-term question, Kurtz said, is whether the paper can have a journalistic impact by providing news other papers lack or whether it will serve largely as "an advertising vehicle."

Robb Montgomery has pictures of the Washington Examiner launch.

You can tell the design consultant because he's the only one wearing a suit.

The champagne from the $1.46 billion purchase of Pulitzer by Lee Enterprises hadn't lost its fizz before 23 people, about 5 percent of the workforce, were laid off Monday at Lee's The Times of Munster, Ind., NewsDesigner.com has learned. Times management says the move has nothing to do with the Pulitzer deal, and in fact considered postponing the announcement.

About six people on the editorial staff were let go, including the design director, night editor, editorial page editor and a photo intern. The Times circulation is 87,000 daily, 93,000 Sunday, and, as of 2003, had 328 full-time and 141 part-time employees.

*Update: The design director in question is Gladys Rios, who came to the Times as design director after a long stint at the Austin American-Statesman, Steve Cavendish reports.

Here's a creative use of white space.

From The Washington Post:

The Russian business daily Kommersant published an edition Monday that was blank except for a court-ordered retraction -- published upside down -- and other items related to an $11.4 million judgment against the publication.

The edition was a satirical protest against a legal finding that the newspaper had erred last summer when it suggested in an article that Moscow-based Alfa Bank was in financial trouble. The Monday edition also included the text of the court's ruling and a photo of the bank's principal shareholder, Mikhail Fridman, shaking hands with President Vladimir Putin.

(Thanks to Jeff Magness for the tip and image)

Courtesy of our pal Robb Montgomery, here's the front page of the first Washington Examiner.

Publisher James McDonald says:

"The Examiner presents a new concept of journalism that we think fits the busy Washington regional market, where our readers may be analyzing the dangers of the Middle East one minute and cheering on their 9-year-old at soccer the next."

"It's always a good day when you have champagne in the newsroom AND champagne in the press room as the first copies come off."

>The Washington Examiner is launched [Washington Examiner]