Portfolio

Newspaper Design

Organization

The Minnesota Daily

  • Front page

    This cover contains stories about a bus strike, a report about the need to improve funding in education, a women's basketball star, a speech by a presidential candidate, a feature about student fees, and several promotions to inside stories.

    The seven-column grid gives the page designer some boundaries, but allows for many creative layouts. A page designer can open up the page for larger feature content by moving the news summary from the right side to the bottom.

  • Editorials page

    This editorials page in the Minnesota Daily contains two staff articles, one guest article, letters, an editorial cartoon, a quote of the day, and photo interviews.

    The Editorials section applies the newspaper's pallate of styles to a traditional editorial page design to create a unique page. The page opens up considerably with photographs and graphics.

  • Sports page

    Front page of the sports section in the Minnesota Daily. It contains four stories and pictures about baseball, basketball, and tennis.

    The sports section repeats the front page design, but may it be organized differently by any page designer.

Summary

The campus newspaper for the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities overhauled its image by expanding from a tabloid size to a broadsheet size and introducing a completely redesigned newspaper to support its new editorial and business goals. Centered around young readers’ needs and expectations for instant information, the award-winning design contains the building blocks for many types of information elements, graphics, and page designs.

The Minnesota Daily is the largest student-run newspaper in the United States and the fourth largest daily newspaper in Minnesota.

The Challenge

The newspaper's new brand needed to be visually appealing and match its editorial voice. To be successful, the design and production process needed to accommodate the restrictions present in any student-run organization. The Minnesota Daily is a learning organization, so most new employees do not understand page design concepts or software. Many employees leave after a year or two, so organizational knowledge disappears quickly. Finally, the late-night editing and layout processes were slowed by inaccurate work from other teams earlier in the day.

The Solution

I created a design that is easy to learn and quick to produce in a few hours every night. It uses typography to visually separate chunks of information. Designers can build a variety of design elements using the same typographic themes. The design is naturally clean and allows editorial and design teams to plan for and build interesting pages.

I also improved the entire production workflow by analyzing processes that affect page layout, standardizing print and color settings for the printer, creating file-naming conventions, and meeting with other teams to find ways to help speed up the production process late at night.

The Result

The redesign launched in February 2003. Readers responded well to the new design, and production employees seemed to appreciate the technical and workflow improvements. The new design has facilitated several first place design awards from the Associated Collegiate Press and the Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Most employees have moved on, but the newspaper has kept the same design for more than three years.

Work Completed

  • Page templates
  • Typography
  • Simple style sheets
  • Software problem solving
  • Production implementation
  • Production workflow improvements