After a successful redesign of The Weekend Herald—APN New Zealand’s flagship publication and the widest-read newspaper in the country—we were approached in early 2012 to work with them again, this time to help re-imagine their weekday paper. The broadsheet daily was moving to a tabloid format (that doesn’t mean more celebrity gossip, just a smaller size) and they wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible—not only for the new format, but for newspapers in general. We created two directions to ‘bookend’ a series of four options that were presented to market research. Our first direction took a more traditional approach, bringing the Weekday in line with the Weekend paper, and the second direction (which we named the Paradigm Shift) questioned every part of the newspaper—from a cover that functioned as a collectible poster, to working with advertisers on new approaches that would in turn offset the cost of innovations in writing, photography, design and print techniques. In the end the finished product took more of a middle-ground approach, but everyone involved was truly invigorated by the process.
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