The vast majority of the newspaper redesigns we’ve been involved with have been firmly in the ‘broadsheet’ category—aimed at what is commonly called the A/B demographic. So the Sunday News redesign was a chance to experience something completely different. With a reputation for ‘red top’ reporting (tabloid fodder in all its glory), one of the biggest challenges was to keep a distinct down-to-earth feel, but build more credibility around the journalism—so rather than feeling like a virtual boys’ club, the newspaper would feel approachable, honest, slightly irreverent and of course entertaining, but still reliable and informative. Given its previous reputation, this was a big job.
However, through smart use of simple design elements and a complete restructure of sections (including creating a brand new section aimed at female readers, and a double-fronted format allowing both news and sport to be on ‘page one’ depending which way the newspaper was read), we created a product worthy of being a serious player in the Sunday market.
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| A simple but bold palette of colours and typefaces help Sunday News assert its presence in the market. The bold graphic devices also help keep a consistent level of visual engagement across colour and black & white sections. |
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| The sports ‘front’ (left) essentially creates a separate newspaper, while bold graphic devices (top right) encourage reader engagement and participation. By the way, one thing we learned during this process is that placing captions in boxes that sit over images (above) is MUCH harder to do when working with prehistoric (but sadly, commonplace) newspaper layout software than you could ever imagine. |
