Jeremy Gilbert : Design Thinker, Professor and Multimedia Journalist » Newspaper Design

SND Digital’s Five Best Designed Apps and Sites

JeremyGilbert — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:51:43 +0000

I had the privilege of judging the inaugural, 2010 Society of News Design’s Best of Digital Design competition. Not only did I have a chance to serve (and argue) with some of the world’s best media design thinkers but we also set standards that future judges will follow.

Society of News Design

The competition was rigorous and the decisions difficult but the five World’s Best Designed are:

CNN.com: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site
CNN for iPad: World’s Best Designed News App
The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Just about all of the winning news organizations designed incredible experiences across multiple platforms. Picking which organization on which platform might have been the most difficult part of the judging.

Lance’s Farewell Tour

JeremyGilbert — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 16:00:56 +0000

Kicking off its Tour de France coverage, the Times wanted to re-educate readers about Lance Armstrong and cycling’s most storied race. This double truck page featured capsules of Lance’s victories, his life story, Tour stages / elevations, challenges, key opponents and successors.

Green with envy

JeremyGilbert — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 17:46:24 +0000

As the Red Sox got ready to take on the Yankees, the Times ran a column comparing the two storied franchises and their recent post-season prowess. I turned Fenway’s Green Monster scoreboard into a simple infographic showing the four playoff meetings and each teams’ world championships.

The News-Press Redesign

JeremyGilbert — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 22:59:07 +0000

What we did, and why
- We constantly conduct research into readers’ interests and needs, and we watch for trends. It became clear that our readers wanted expanded local content and an updated look. With this redesign, we offer three things: more local, regional and state news every day; three new sections to serve special reader interests; and a contemporary new look.
All about ease
- Changes made to the typography and layout of The News-Press were all designed to make it easier for readers to use the newspaper. The type that we use for stories is now larger. Colors have been assigned to each section as visual markers for readers. And labels and dividing lines are being used to more clearly distinguish stories and topics.
Finding your way
- We formerly used a left-hand column on page A1 to tell readers where to find information inside the newspaper. The narrow, static space confined our ability to showcase features that readers might enjoy â€” if only they knew about them. We’ve moved those items to a horizontal space to provide a better road map to the day’s newspaper.
Typography
- About 80 percent of the material on a newspaper page is text. We’ve selected new type for our words, both stories and headlines.
- Headlines: The primary news headlines will be Miller Headline, a serif type that is authoritative and highly readable. Relay, a sans-serif type, is crisp and contemporary. It will be used most often for feature stories.
Body text
- The type used for stories is now slightly larger. More noticeable is that it is bolder. We’ve also increased the white space between lines of type because that makes reading much easier.
- New body type: Poynter Old Style Text 3 (weight), 9.5 pts; 10.25 pt leading; -4.5 tracking; locked to a 10.25 pt baseline grid.
- Old body type: Poynter Old Style Text 1 (weight), 9.4 pts; 9.7 pt leading; -6 tracking.
Topic labels
- We will use labels to call attention to topics that are of especially high interest to our readers – topics such as education, environment and growth/development. Labeling allows us to give more specific information in the headlines themselves.
Navigate by color
- Each section of The News-Press has been assigned a color. Sports, for example, is sand (we chose a color palette to reflect Southwest Florida). If a graphic or promotional item from Sports appears in another section, it will remain sand-colored as a visual clue for the reader.
New sections
- The Cape: Expanded coverage of business, recreation, neighborhoods, churches and people.
- Healthy Living: Fitness features, beauty/appearance tips and advice specific to subtropical life.
- Real estate consumer: Advice for renters, columns on how to buy and sell and tips specific to Southwest Florida.
Expanded Local & State
- Your Community: This daily page will host news of churches, clubs, neighborhoods and schools as well as a community events calendar.
- Southwest Florida: This daily page pulls together information from around our region – Lee and neighboring counties.
- Florida: This page spans all of Florida, from the Panhandle to the Keys.
Reorganized Gulf Coasting
- Our entertainment guide has been organized by topic so information is easier to find. Many topics have been changed to at-a-glance grid formats.
- Added: events around the state, roundup of events for kids.
- Expanded: “Best Bets” for weekend fun.

Haiti’s Hope: Touching the Heart of Haiti

JeremyGilbert — Sun, 30 May 2004 13:00:36 +0000

The project.
- For 10 days The News-Press had a reporter-photographer team trekking through Haiti searching for the stories that tied the island-nation to Southwest Florida.
  Those stories concentrated on the mission work of a variety of groups: A pastor-doctor who runs an orphanage and ministers to mountain villages, a family that runs a church school in the highlands, a secular orphanage in Port-Au-Prince and a group that teaches eco-friendly farming techniques. Each tale became its own chapter in a 12-page special section. The reporter, Miriam Pereira, wrote several hundred inches of text, including a column relating the experience to her own immigrant background and the photographer, Andrew West, took more than 2,000 images – 38 of which appear in the section.
The cover.
- The project was heavily photo-driven. The quality of the images and the character of the people captured in the photographs dominated the pages. The cover was meant to reflect the startling differences between life in Haiti and Southwest Florida.
  Because ‘Haiti’s Hope’ was printed on heavier-stock paper it allowed for the publication of unusual photos. The main image on the page is of a Haitian child racing his horse through the market. The motion blur that saturates the image conveys the motion and excitement of the moment in a way that a normal photo could not.
Pages 2-3.
- These pages set the scene for the stories to come. A column introduced the trip and an overview story gave readers background about Haiti’s social, political and economic situation.
  The spread also introduced the visual style of the rest of the section: generous columns of white space, stark black dropcaps, labels and navigation.
Pages 4-5
- The ECHO and HAFF missions are linked. ECHO explores alternate farming techniques that allow for the growth of subsistence and commercial crops even when faced with the terrible deforestation of Haiti. The photographs of farm workers and ECHO members capture the toil and desolation of farm work in Haiti. It is possible to raise crops, but just barely.
  The missionaries of HAFF moved to Haiti from Southwest Florida nearly six years ago. In that time they have setup a school and a mission in the highlands and their lives have become entwined with those of the people they serve. The strength of these photographs is the sense of equality and not missionary zealousness.
Pages 6-7
- This doubletruck photo spread finishes the story of the HAFF mission and gave ample room to document the lives of the Haitians and the HAFF missionaries.
  Again, heavier paper stock allowed for riskier photographs like the largest photograph on the page, which shows the energy of the market through a reflection in a car window.
  With hundreds of HAFF images to pick from, editing the photos for this page was a challenge.
Pages 8-9
- Love-A-Child is a secular organization that supports Haitian orphanages. Although the organization had strong ties to Southwest Florida neither the story nor the images were among the strongest in the section.
  The Love-A-Child chapter was juxtaposed against the strongest and most dramatic chapter in the section, that of Pastor George. The pastor runs a private orphanage in Haiti, is married to a Sanibel, FL woman and acts as a doctor to a number of highland Haitian villages.
  The reporter and photographer spent nearly as much time with Pastor George as they did with all the other subjects of the section. The pastor let me them sleep in his orphanage and follow him up the mountain.
Pages 10-11
- The second page of the Pastor George story concentrates on his weekly trip up to the highlands. The three photos on page 10 are some of the most storytelling in the section.
  Page 11 is a photo page of other images from the Pastor George story. I concentrated on balancing the size and weight of the images. The face at the top of the page could easily over power the other pictures if the size of the images was not in proportion.
The closing page
- The last page of the special section offered an opportunity to display photographs without a home elsewhere in the section. A pair of images – the dominant photo of a girl carrying a bucket of river water and the portrait at the bottom of the page – were originally in consideration for either the front page of the section or the newspaper. These startling pictures, plus a healthy dose of white space, end the section with a strong closing note and hopefully leave a lasting impression of what was witnessed.

Shekel, Rattle & Roll

JeremyGilbert — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 01:25:42 +0000

A designer approached me with a stock guitar photo and requested a “a guitar with a Jewish star on the stock.”

Instead, I called Fender got a guitar image, changed the color, duplicated it five times and wove together the final image. Unfortunately the headline was changed at the last hour, but otherwise the illustration ran as you see it here.

Spring Training

JeremyGilbert — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:23:41 +0000

Each year The News-Press produces a special section kicking off the coverage of the Minnesota Twins and Boston Red Sox spring training in Fort Myers. This year the theme was the building blocks of each team. Individual players’ assets were pieced together to form a whole team. The graphic was ‘pasted together’ and ‘tacked up’ in Photoshop.

Beginning of the end?

JeremyGilbert — Fri, 05 Dec 2003 01:01:31 +0000

The capture of Saddam Hussein presented the first major news story post-redesign (October 2003). One of the goals of the redesign was to present a flexible front page that could adapt to news of all varieties. Immediately most of the promotion was stripped off the page. The photos and headlines were kept simple and powerful. Each element was meant to tell the reader something essential.

Columbia is lost

JeremyGilbert — Tue, 04 Feb 2003 01:21:30 +0000

At 9 A.M. on February 2, 2003 my younger brother and I were turning onto the back nine at a local golf course. At about that same time NASA’s mission control lost contact with the Space Shuttle Columbia. It was actually my brother who got the phone call first. Back at the newspaper, we pieced together the fragmented story in a wrap package to explain as best we could to our stunned readers. This is the front page of that section. The time line above the fold provided readers with a moment-to-moment breakdown of the event.

Reflections on Change

JeremyGilbert — Thu, 12 Sep 2002 01:29:21 +0000

Fort Myers is both culturally and geographically distant from NYC or Washington D.C. However, the tragedy of 9/11 was still a major event for the community. In illustrating the feelings of that day I concentrated on the visceral experience most of The News-Press’ readers shared: watching the handiwork of the terrorists via CNN.

Jeremy Gilbert : Design Thinker, Professor and Multimedia Journalist » Newspaper Design

SND Digital’s Five Best Designed Apps and Sites

Lance’s Farewell Tour

Green with envy

The News-Press Redesign

What we did, and why

All about ease

Finding your way

Typography

Body text

Topic labels

Navigate by color

New sections

Expanded Local & State

Reorganized Gulf Coasting

Haiti’s Hope: Touching the Heart of Haiti

The project.

The cover.

Pages 2-3.

Pages 4-5

Pages 6-7

Pages 8-9

Pages 10-11

The closing page

Shekel, Rattle & Roll

Spring Training

Beginning of the end?

Columbia is lost

Reflections on Change