mario garcia
Case Study |
The Wall Street Journal The Challenge: The Wall Street Journal is the icon of what a newspaper should look like. As a professor at Syracuse, I began each semester by holding up a copy of the paper and asking my eager students to redesign it. It isn't a surprise that the students tried to make it “modern” by placing a photo on page one. The most daring designed a new color logo, but the wisest students would effect subtle changes, using brushes, light colors, and thin strokes. In these cases, the design played in the choir, while the texts and the content were the protagonists. In 1999 I began to redesign the international editions in Europe and Asia. The work was completed successfully, with the introduction of color and photography in both editions. Next, it was time to work with the merican “mothership” version. This was a more challenging task: more pages and many more (mostly conservative) readers. From the beginning, the redesign was a collaborative effort between Garcia Media and the Journal team, headed by Joanne Lipman, deputy managing editor, and Joe Dizney, art director.
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What we did: As if researching to write a novel or screenplay, the designers and I engaged in visual archaeology, studying issues from the 1920s through the 1950s. We discovered visual motifs, story structures, and storytelling that played a major part in the redesign.
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mario garcia
What we did: We started by developing story structures to facilitate hierarchy through the pages: each story was composed of specific elements, depending on placement and importance. This helps to move the reader from story to story, and page to page.
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What we did: Once we had established story structures, we concentrated on page architecture, moving away from a rigid, sixcolumn format, and introducing some five column formats for section fronts.
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What we did: A basic foundation of the redesign was the introduction of a color palette. We made sure that when color appeared on a page, it was sophisticated and elegant. We used a few subtle colors consistently and repeatedly, including mint green, sky blue, and soft champagne.
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What we did: A refined redrawing of the Scotch Roman typeface gave the new Journal a look that—although new and modern—did not take away from the tradition of the paper. An avid reader would still recognize his reliable paper in the newly redesigned version.
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What we did: Our main goal was to preserve that which is genuinely and uniquely The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, we introduced modern elements such as better navigation, including a new panel on page one to promote interior stories. Now these new elements become part of the Journal’s identity for future readers.
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