August 11th, 2009

Nursing and Magazines

In between dipper changing and feeding I found some time and managed to upload some spreads from the recent work on Esquire magazine.

I used the Blast Gothic font which is a very compressed font and gives a neo-retro look. It reminds me of the classic Danhill logo and gives a very good starting point to experiment with type.

A lot of nudity as you see but it is the summer issue ;)

I also designed the ending section which we named "ETC" and made some minor changes in the first section called MAHB (Man At His Best).

Esquire was published every month as a Sunday supplement to ETK (Eleftheros Typos on Sunday). Since ET is no longer with, us Mr Kostopoulos, the publisher made a bold decision and continues to publish it on the news stand every month.

It felt very good working for Esquire again after 5 years. I love this mag because it is snob and clever. Both in it's features and in design. Not just fancy stuff with no meaning at all.

I will work on the next one and hopefully manage to complete the redesign in the front section and fine tune "ETC".

July 27th, 2009

Fatherhood

I know I have to write for a long time. The reason is the birth of my daughter. So I don't have any time at all. I am working on some interesting projects at the time. I will upload some of that work in a while. In particular I am working on Fortune Greek Edition and Esquire!!! (again) which I kind of redesign. In September I finish with ESQ and the redesign will be complete. At the end of the month Fortune will be complete. I will upload some spreads at the time.

July 11th, 2009

Its the journalism stupid

A lot of things have been said after the closure of ET 2 weeks ago. Some say its the internet, some say its the politics, some even say it was the design!!!!!!!

What everybody is missing is that it was not the internet, nor the politics and for sure it was not the design.

It was bad journalism.

Period.

And other newspapers will follow. At least those who continue to work with the editorial model that exists today in the majority of the newspapers, not only in Greece but globally.

Graydon Carter, the editor in chief of Vanity Fair magazine, in a recent "editors letter" devoted his column to the "Death of the Newspapers"

"My suggestion to newspapers everywhere is to give the public a reason to read them again. So here’s an idea: get on a big story with widespread public appeal, devote your best resources to it, say a quiet prayer, and swing for the fences."

for the Daily Telegraph hit series he mentions

"And although the paper broke the stories on its Web site, then fed them into the next morning’s print edition, sales of the actual paper exploded. On the Friday the story broke in print, theTelegraph sold out. Since then, the paper has sold an extra 600,000 copies. According to the paper, it was the biggest sales uptick for a non-conflict-related story since World War II. More letters poured in from readers than at any other time in theTelegraph’s history. The story was so compelling that competing papers were grudgingly forced to illustrate their reports on the affair with shots of the Telegraph’s banner headlines. There is now talk of a knighthood for Lewis for his part in uncovering the scandal.

And they say newspapers are dead."

That said, I can understand that when you are faced with unemployment you try to find the explanation that suits you. So 2 days ago I heard that the former workers of ET (who have made a blog) said that design was killing journalism. I will only say to them that for the past 1 1/2 - 2 years the Sunday edition was redesigned to fit their needs since they believed that there was not enough text to make good journalism. The new ET on Sunday (ETK) was 120 pages of average 1000 words per page but dropped in sales from 120.000 to 56.000. Oh, and it won the Worlds Best Designed. So the sooner every one understands the lesson that we are taught the sooner we will think in the right direction and eventually save our jobs and our professions.

Now for those who don't want to learn the lesson, the only thing I can say is that I feel sorry for them.

June 25th, 2009

"This close" or how to murder a newspaper

The funny (for those who know about it) title of this article was eventually prophetic. This came out of the mouth of one of the many Editors in chief of Eleftheros Tipos (ET) newspaper, the first one I knew. Sadly ET closed 3 days ago. It was a shock for me since it was one of the best works I have ever done and there are a lot of colleagues I admire that are left jobless in the worst possible time.

What lead to this situation is a combination of many different believes and decisions and many many mistakes.

Mr. Smailis, the first Editor in chief with whom I worked on the paper, believed that at least the graphic model (if not also the editorial one) that we applied would not succeed in Greece (something that was told a lot by all the journalists from the beginning). Of course he and every one else were totally wrong. On the contrary we managed to get one European and one World best designed award. What he was prophetic about, without knowing, was that the editorial model that the journalists chose to follow, ignoring the proposed one, would be the end of the newspaper. And that was exactly the same as the one they used before.

It's not strange at all that the paper closed. ET before the relaunch was selling around 10.000-15.000 a day and 45.000 on Sunday. It was it’s lowest numbers since its birth on 1984. After the relaunch it started rising in circulation reaching 25.000 – 35.000 on the daily and 120.000 on Sunday. These numbers were steady for at least 3-4 months. After that the editorial model changed back to the old ways. And with it slowly came the old numbers, both in circulation and in advertisement.

But what is this old editorial model. Well its something that every newspaper professional knows and understands. Politically engaged publisher, editor, and journalist interests are the daily agenda. For every Editor in Chief, a newspaper is only about the first 10 political pages. The rest is to decorate the package. What I heard a lot while working on the headlines on the front page was “what stories do the others have?”. By "others" the editor meant world news, art and culture, sports, lifestyle and social sections. As if the rest of the paper was a separate business.

And of course everything was yesterday’s news. It was what we could hear on the radio, see on the TV, read at the Internet only one day before.

There was a research conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for ET that was presented to the chief editors. The findings of that research showed clearly that the newspaper had the potential to make the difference and invite new readers if it changed its agenda to a more independent point of view, if it had more social, urban and young oriented stories and less politics. The graphic model had done the job. It had made the paper friendlier to a bigger portion of the population. That was shown in the results of the research. The only 2 sectors that ET was a leader in the market were its appearance and freshness and the use of photography and infographics to tell a story.

And what did they do? They ignored all the findings about the editorial module and tried to change the graphic model that had already at the time won the European Design Award.

As months went by and the numbers were dropping the editors were turning even closer to the old model until eventually the newspaper lost its credibility and with it it’s readers. The political line was changing day by day since every one from journalists to publisher pushed their own agenda ignoring the only thing that could keep them alive. The readers.

I strongly believe that there is a successful model. There are plenty examples all over the world. Even on saturated markets like UK the Daily Telegraph showed the way. Unique content. Your own reporting. Make the tomorrow’s agenda. On Eastern Europe we see a lot of newspapers who have redesigned both graphically and journalistic to rise their circulation in some situations 100%.

Asia is the next big market. We witnessed a transformation of the newspapers in Asia beginning in the UAE and ending in China who hosted the 2008 Olympic Games. Beautiful newspapers design wise that became market leaders.

I believe in 2009 the New York Times model is dying. We must follow the trends and produce elegant newspapers that are pretty, clever, modern, and have unique content.

June 25th, 2009

Some more pages from Book Press

Yesterday I officially finished the Book Press project. I spent the day at the printing factory to overlook the procedure. The outcome was fantastic.

Book Press is a monthly free press newspaper that deals with books and book lovers. But not only. The goal is to widen the topics in nearby subjects like art, cinema, trends in metropolitan cities etc. This first issue is a sort of summer special so it is full of book presentations and it is not exactly the compete picture.

So here are some more pages from the first issue which will be out on Friday.