TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Pictures of the Year competition is currently being judged, and they’re posting results as things progress. Tyler Hicks of The New York Times has been named Newspaper Photographer of the Year.

SND has announced the winners of Gold medals in the Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition. They are: The Virginian-Pilot, Welt Am Sonntag, The New York Times Magazine, Palm Beach Post, The New York Times, El Mundo, Excelsior and El Mundo again. SND’s contest blog has more images. The Pilot page that won (above, by Sam Hundley) generated a lot of discussion when I posted it last fall.

SND has announced the World’s Best-Designed Newspapers. They are: Äripäev of Tallinn, Estonia; El Economista of Madrid, Spain; Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of Frankfurt, Germany; and Politiken of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Update: And the (tentative) top ten winners list:

1. The New York Times (and its magazines)


2. Los Angeles Times (and its magazine)


3. Excelsior [Mexico]


4. Hartford Courant


5. San Jose Mercury News


6. The Boston Globe (and its magazine)


7. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel


8. La Presse [Montreal]


9. The (Cleveland) Plain-Dealer


10. El Mundo (and its magazines) [Spain]

updated.

Kenney Marlatt, manning the SND International Web Desk at the SND contest judging in Syracuse, spotted a huge entry from the LA Times and recorded it on video, complete with the perfect musical counterpoint.

It snowed in Syracuse, just a little, originally uploaded by Steve313.

The massive undertaking that is the judging of the Society for News Design's Creative Competition is getting underway this weekend in sunny Syracuse. They're promising blog coverage, Flickr coverage and YouTube coverage. So it's almost like being there! Except for, you know, the 12 feet of snow. And the beer.

The New York Observer, every literate New Yorker’s favorite pink newspaper, relaunched as a tabloid on Wednesday.

It’s printed on 30 pound stock, with a four-page wrap on 50 pound stock (the page above is the front of the wrap). Location, the real estate section, moves to the back cover. Typographically, they’re using Dispatch, Benton Sans and Mercury for display type. The front-page flag is by Jim Parkinson.

David Carr fretted in The New York Times:

The Observer redesign, however, is not simply a redesign, but a change in fundamentals, an altering of the product’s DNA.

As a technology, the new format works fine, more manageable, easier to navigate. But as a thing — and the physical properties of a print publication are more important in the digital age, not less so — The Observer has been trimmed in a way that makes it fit in all too well.

Does nostalgic-for-the-status-quo Carr have $2 million a year to cover the Observer's status-quo losses?

>A Note on the Redesign [New York Observer]
>A Cheeky Broadsheet’s Tabloid Makeover [The New York Times]
>Who Moved David Carr's ‘Observer’? [New York Magazine]
>Paper Cuts [New York Post]

Now that this cold is mostly done kicking me around, a few things:

• More bad news for newspapers: The creative tornado that is Stephanie Grace Lim is leaving the San Jose Mercury News to take a design job with PayPal.


• Don’t miss Karl Gude’s weeklong remembrance at Visual Editors of the late, lamented sports daily The National.


• If you’ve got some cash rattling around in your training budget, you might try The Design Seminar: Visual Storytelling for Print and Web, a seminar at the American Press Institute March 5-8.


• Robin Sloan on how news will be consumed in 5-10 years: “I think ‘news’ just becomes a less distinct category. You don’t sit down with a newspaper, or even a news website, or even a super wireless e-paper device, for 10 minutes in the morning to very formally ‘get your news.’ Rather, you get all sorts of news and information -- from the personal to the professional to the political -- throughout the day, in little bits and bursts, via many different media. With any luck, in 5-10 years the word ‘news’ will be sort of confusing: Don’t you just mean ‘life’?”

The Idaho State Journal in Pocatello launched a redesign Monday. Editor Ian H. Fennell wrote in his weblog Feb. 3 about the focus group process.

[T]he overall response to our new look and content was overwhelmingly positive.

Most of our focus group participants said the new Journal was a dramatic improvement over the current paper and they urged us to follow through with the changes.

We took that advice and are proud to say that the new Journal is a totally reader-driven creation. You told us what you wanted and we listened.

Consultant Alan Jacobson has more details and page images at his site.

The Washington Post published an Edmund Arnold obituary Friday.

Through recent years, Mr. Arnold remained a vital, sometimes curmudgeonly force, speaking out for the frustrated average reader who tried to understand editorial judgments -- and misjudgments.

“The front-page images on our newspaper are becoming so big that they don’t attract the reader, they attract the looker,” he told a Society for News Design publication in 2000. “And they often don’t work because the broadsheet page is folded so you only see half of it in the news rack. We are over-designing, and we are over-coloring, so what the reader is confronted by is a three-ring circus. Who do I watch? The bareback riders, the weightlifter or the jugglers?”

He also disliked placing advertisements on the front page, an act he likened to NASCAR drivers who resemble “walking billboards.”

Update: And The New York Times ran an obit by Steven Heller in Monday's paper. It includes an excellent photo by Josh Meltzer of The Roanoke Times.

(Thanks, Denny!)

>Edmund Arnold, 93; Designed Newspapers [The Washington Post]
>Edmund C. Arnold, Bold Newspaper Designer, Dies at 93 [The New York TImes]

Today’s Merc’s got one of the larger front-page ads I’ve seen on an American front page that’s not the Wall Street Journal. Even Gannett seems to stick to the relatively unobtrusive full-width strip at the bottom of the page. Update: As Andrew points out in the comments, the Arizona Republic has started the same thing.

Update2: Merc Design Director Michael Tribble weighs in in the comments:

For years, journalists at most American papers have regarded covers as sacred places meant only for editorial coverage. But while our industry faces challenging economic times, we all understand that a transition into different ways of thinking (and different revenue sources) is necessary.

(Thanks, Josh!)

Edmund Arnold, known by many as the “Father of Modern Newspaper Design,” died at 93 on Feb. 2. He was a typographer, editor and a founder of the Society for News Design. SND has an obit up.

He worked with hundreds of newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, the Boston Globe, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the National Observer, the Toronto Star, the Kansas City Star, El Vocero and El Mundo in San Juan. He received the George Polk Memorial Award in 1957 for his contribution to American journalism through typographic redesign. In 1960 he joined the School of Journalism at Syracuse University, where he headed the graphic arts department. Almost unheard of in the academic world, he was named a full professor despite having no previous formal teaching experience and despite having only a bachelor's degree (Michigan State, 1954).

Update: SND has remembrances from Mario Garcia, Nan Bisher, Richard Curtis and Phil Nesbitt. And here's the Roanoke Times obit.

Mint, a new financial daily in India, launched in print and online today. Garcia Media did the design for both the print and online products. Mario Garcia writes about his approach to the design:

1. It should be colorful, like India itself.


2. Ideally it should be in a small format -- we did versions of broadsheet and Berliner, and opted for the smaller, easier to handle format.


3. It must have perfect fusion with the online product. And, in fact, I recommended from the start that this product should appear FIRST as an online newspaper, and then two weeks later on print. That is the way it will be. This newspaper is born as an online product.


4. There should be substance, but also quick reads.


5. Navigation should be paramount.

>Mint [Garcia Media]
>Have a (live) Mint [Garcia Media]