The South Florida Sun-Sentinel launched its redesign today. Charles Apple’s got every detail you’ll ever want to know.

And over at SportsJournalists.com, everyone’s got an opinion.

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The Orlando Sentinel debuted its redesign this morning. Charles Apple’s got images and thoughts.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in with a piece in Monday’s edition. (Tip: if you’re not a WSJ subscriber, go through Digg).

Past experience shows newspaper makeovers don’t necessarily translate into financial success. After the Bakersfield Californian underwent a drastic redesign two years ago, the 60,000-circulation paper in California’s Central Valley saw a small initial jolt to circulation and revenue, sparked by the brighter look and expanded coverage of hot topics like immigration. But the gains have been erased as the area economy struggles. Bakersfield Californian Chief Executive Richard Beene says the steps were necessary to keep the paper relevant, but he has advice for others considering a similar redesign: “Don’t expect it to turn around circulation or revenue overnight. It’s not a magic bullet.”

Consultant Alan Jacobson launched a broadside against the redesign Friday, saying it needed to “concentrate on content rather than cosmetics.”

In these troubled times for newspapers, it’s important to note that “readership” and “revenue” are conspicuous by their absence from virtually all the words that have been published about Orlando’s redesign. Instead, much has been made of the cosmetic changes to come.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a redesign if somebody didn’t compare it to USA Today.

Update: And Mario Garcia writes about the black reverse nameplate.

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The Chicago Tribune will launch a redesign in mid-September, Editor Ann Marie Lipinski told the staff today.

"We are committed to determining the basic architecture and sectioning of the paper within 30 days; deciding on paging (how many and where) within 45 days; understanding our staffing levels throughout the paper in 60 days; and being ready to launch a rethought and redesigned Tribune within 90 days in mid-September."

Romenesko’s got the full memo.

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Charles Apple has the definitive post on the upcoming Orlando redesign, including a Q&A with Bo Burton, images, the works. So go there.

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The schedule for SND Vegas has been posted. Check it out.

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Newspaper design legend Mario Garcia has entered the world of blog. It’s “about storytelling, design, the projects we work on, the things we learn along the way.”

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OK, here’s a passel of additional before-and-after Orlando prototype pages for the upcoming redesign, again thanks to Bo Burton. More pages after the jump.

Continue reading "More Ado About Orlando"

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If Saul Bass did the Star Wars titles:

(via Calacanis)

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Saturday was the Albuquerque Tribune’s last day. E.W. Scripps Co. determined the market could no longer support an afternoon paper and couldn’t find a buyer. The paper’s circulation in January had dwindled to 9,600 from 42,000 in the late ’80s.

The Trib long had a fine reputation as a visual paper. Here’s a slideshow with photos and words from Tribune photographers and editors. Go poke around the Trib’s site and read the remembrances, some of which I’ve linked below.

Incidentally, the guy at right in the 1994 page above is Tribune Managing Editor Neal Pattison, now executive editor at The Herald in Everett, Wash., and a former president of the Society for News Design. (And, full disclosure, the guy on the left is Tribune City Editor Michael Arrieta-Walden, who is now my boss.)

» Mike Davis: We set out to challenge readers and ourselves with the best pictures possible [Albuquerque Tribune]

» Mark Holm: Our photos hold up a mirror to the world and share the responsibility of reporting the news [Albuquerque Tribune]

» Eileen Welsome, Albuquerque Tribune made history with ‘The Plutonium Experiment’ [Albuquerque Tribune]

» Neal Pattison: Take a piece of my heart [Everett Herald]

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SND29: The 2007 World's Best-Designed Newspapers from Society for News Design on Vimeo.

The Society for News Design has announced the “World’s Best-Designed Newspapers.” They are:

• Akzia in Moscow, daily, circulation 200,000
• Expresso in Paco de Arcos, Portugal, daily, circulation 140,000
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Frankfurt, Germany, weekly, circulation 320,000
• The Guardian in London, daily, circulation 355,750.

More details, videos, etc., here.

Also, the full database of all SND winners is now online. Update: Well, I guess it's not anymore. Tomorrow, they say. Update2: It's up now!

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io9 has a roundup of sci-fi newspapers, including the one above from “Ultraviolet” about a Vampire Epidemic!!! Too bad most Hollywood movies can’t get their prop newspapers even close to looking right.

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The Chicago Tribune, following the industry trend, debuts a narrower page Monday. They're taking the opportunity to make a few design changes, not the least of which is to change the Page One nameplate. It's been reversed out of a blue field for the last 25 years, but no longer. Joe Knowles, the Trib's AME for design and graphics tells the SND Update blog that "it had become overpowering in a way. It was a difficult visual element to overcome on the page. The new one lets the content come forward." The nameplate was redrawn by Jim Parkinson.

They're also making some typographic tweaks and some other minor changes. Details here.

>Goodbye blue at the Chicago Tribune [SND Update]

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Here are the top U.S. front pages today in the wake of yesterday's New Hampshire primary.

Given that the No. 2 most overused word of last night's coverage was "comeback," I did NOT just see five major newspapers use "Comeback Kids" as a headline!

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Newspapers & Technology reports that The Miami Herald is planning to outsource "some of its copy editing and page layout design work to Mindworks, a prepress production firm based in New Delhi, India." The company will oversee a weekly section of Broward County community news and other specialty advertising sections.

Wow. First I've heard of actual editorial design work being outsourced.

Update: I had previously linked to E&P, but it appears the report initiated with News & Tech, so I've changed the link. Thanks, Chuck!

Update 2:Robb points out this was an AP story on Dec. 27, noted, with the Herald memo, on Visual Editors. Hmm, trying to drop the bad news turd unnoticed in the middle of a holiday week. Where would a newspaper editor learn such a thing?

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I’ve collected some front pages on the Benazir Bhutto assassination, in international and U.S. flavors.

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Word came yesterday that Michael Whitley has been named Assistant Managing Editor for Design at the L.A. Times. Here’s a look back at the work Michael and his staff did during the fires in October.

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When’s the last time your front page nabbed a thief?

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The Washington Post debuted a new Style & Arts section on Aug. 26. It’s a merger of two regular Sunday sections.

Deputy Assistant Managing Editor for News Art Denny Brack and Style Design Director Martha Wright created the new design. Martha says:

Changes include enhanced Web keys, better use of color positions, more air on inside pages and the front, and frameless photos. Content is organized under Sounds (music), Stages (theater and dance), Screens (movies, TV, Internet) and Sights (the visual Arts). We've added Robin Givhan as a Sunday columnist, and created a Conversations page, anchored by a regular Q&A. There's also a Studio page, where local artists can explain their pieces in their own words. We'll have a doubletruck each week to showcase the work of staff photographers or take a closer look at other topics that demand that size and scope (normally it'd stand alone — happened to be a jump for our debut issue).

More pages after the jump:

Continue reading "Merging Style and Arts at the Post"

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If you haven't seen it, you must watch this demo by Microsoft researcher Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Seadragon and Photosynth from the TED conference. Mindblowing.

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Khoi Vinh, design director of nytimes.com (and SND Boston speaker) has a brilliant post that distills a lot of the thoughts about print designers and the web that have been banging around my skull for months. It's a must-read.

The prerequisite for doing something meaningful with any of these skills — HTML, CSS, Flash or whatever — is first embracing the medium as something different from print. Indeed, there's no point in learning these skills unless as a print designer you've made a prior shift in your understanding of how design works in digital media. Specifically, come to grips with the fact that, on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it's a method for making behaviors possible.

More often than not, the reflexive approach that I've seen print designers take on the Web is to treat it as a vehicle for print-based design practices: fixing type sizes, specifying typefaces, ignoring usability and expediency, and perhaps most notoriously making the assumption that, over time, users will come around to a print-focused way of consuming content.

In my experience, none of those tactics work. Their all-around ill-suitedness tends to boil over to frustration when print designers realize that, by and large, there's little room for visual virtuosity online. Which is to say, the Web is not commonly an effective tool for highly expressive displays of typographic, photographic or illustrative skill. Looking for opportunities to execute the sort of improvisational and dramatic creative visions that we see in printed periodicals, for instance, is likely to be an exercise in disappointment.

I suspect this may be a bit of a preview of his SND Boston session "Print Vs. Online Design: Can a print designer find happiness online? Can a web designer learn from print?"

>This Way to the Web, Print Designers! [Subtraction.com]

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You got the mutha-kernin’ skillz, yo?

(Thanks, Greg!)

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The Associated Press noted over the weekend that New Zealand newspaper publisher APN News & Media has started outsourcing copy editing and layout work at some of its newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald, the country’s largest daily.

Starting Sunday, 20 full-time sub-editors at contractor Pagemasters New Zealand will be “operating on an extension of APN’s ‘Cyber’ computer editorial production system” at a site 20 minutes from the paper’s editorial offices, [APN deputy chief executive Rick] Neville said.

By the end of 2007, Pagemasters will have about 45 editing staff at their site to edit the seven newspapers — nearly 30 fewer than the newspapers employed for the job.

To be fair, this doesn’t really look like a “copy editing/design sweatshop a continent away” type situation. Pagemasters New Zealand is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Australian Associated Press, and they put together TV listings, comics pages and feature packages, among other things. Not all that different from some of the services syndicates or newspaper chains offer in the U.S.

Still, this is an order of magnitude different than contracting out the TV book or using the occasional wire-service-provided layout. And hardly seems likely to improve more than the short-term bottom line.

“I’m confident readers won’t notice the difference,” said Neville, who has led the project.

Well, no, maybe they won’t. But is that really what we’re looking for in newspapers today? For our ever-dwindling number of readers to not notice what we’re doing? Seems to me that’s precisely what we want to avoid.

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The New York Times looks a bit more svelte today, rolling out its new 12" width, a 1½-inch reduction in width that brings the Times in line with most American broadsheets.

If you don't happen to have copies of the last two days' Timeses to compare, here's a goofy little animated GIF I cooked up that may give you some idea.

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Here are the front pages of the two Twin Cities papers today.

Good, prominent reefers to online coverage in the Strib and Pioneer Press. Even though that's sort of a sad admission that "yeah, this information you're reading is out of date." I like how the Strib sends you to a dedicated bridge coverage page that's got everything in one spot (and, interestingly, no ads).

Also, front pages from the Top 50 circ US dailies are here.

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Looks like ads may be coming to the front page of the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Observed says. In a memo to the staff, publisher David Hiller said the paper had “one of the worst quarters ever experienced,” and that the newspaper faces more competition for advertisers and is looking at “expanding the types and positioning of advertising.”

Here’s what Hiller said about the ads:

There has been a lot of focus on such ads, and I know there a real mix of views and emotions on this subject, so let me tell you what I think of them:

• Front page ads will raise several million dollars in revenue, and make a meaningful contribution to improving current trends
• We will make sure the revenue is additive, and not just switched from other pages
• They will help pay for the content we create for readers, and for our investment in new growth opportunities
• They are common at reputable papers across the U.S. and Europe, including in the Wall Street Journal’s much admired re-design
• Space taken (1 ½” strip) and related design issues can be managed
• We will have standards to ensure the ads look good, not schlocky
• If we communicate well, reader reaction should be OK

Update: As Anonymous points out, the Chicago Tribune reports that it will likely follow suit and that Newsday is considering it as well.

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Something to remember next time you're whining about the A/C in the office not keeping you quite cool enough: Richard Turley, art director of The Guardian's G2 magazine, has an excellent piece at Design Observer about putting together the section smack in the middle of the mud-filled Glastonbury rock festival last month.

It might have been repeatedly falling over in the mud. It might have been being lost and insignificant in the ocean of people of all ages, denominations, races, classes. It might very well have been the cider. Whatever or whenever it was, there was no other decision to be made. We were going off the grid. We were going off the grid in a big way.

Well, in truth, we were off the grid way before anyway. Designing 20-odd pages of a newspaper supplement from the middle of a field was already a challenge to technology, patience and the normal processes of producing G2. Usually, and quite rightly, newspaper design is bound by the conventions of its production and structure, by the fast turnaround of ideas that precludes against overtly expressive design, and by the formal traditions, craft and Victorian ideologies of the newspaper. News designers live very much on the grid, working from templates, tied by the rules of preassigned headline, text, caption sizes, precise spacing. It is an exacting, dictatorial, inherently rigid view of the world of design. The grid is the imperious king, with whom you do not mess.

>Richard Turley: Off the Grid [Design Observer]

(Thanks, Michael and Richard!)

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Hope your V-D Day celebrations were full of joy and hope for humanity.

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This is just the most awesomest thing ever. Scott Walker, an assistant managing editor at the Birmingham News, has hacked together an old newspaper box, a Mac Mini, and a flat screen monitor to create a digital newsstand that will grab pages from the internet and display them in the rack. Brilliant!

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Here are some before-and-afters (afters on the right) of the Virginian-Pilot’s new design.

And here are some new inside pages:

Continue reading "Take Me to the Pilot"

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The Star-Telegram of Fort Worth launched a redesign on Sunday. They’ve narrowed the web width and turned Page One into a billboard for the rest of the paper.

In the four-page reader’s guide (PDF), Executive Editor Jim Witt writes:

You also need us to respect your busy life. Our quick-read formats will help you zero in on the information important to you, to speed you on your way. We think they also bring a jolt of energy and innovation to the paper.

The typography is Capitolium, Freight Micro, Freight Sans and Utopia.

This seems to be, in some ways, and extension of the paper’s 2004 redesign when the Sunday and Monday front pages became more teaser-oriented.

You can see what readers are saying about the changes here.

Here are some pages from the Sunday and Monday papers:

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L.A. Times Creative Director Joe Hutchinson will become the art director of Rolling Stone, L.A. Observed and the SND blog are reporting. The New York Post said last month that Hutchinson turned the job down, but he’s reported to have reconsidered in the face of news that the Times will cut its workforce by 5 percent (150 positions, 70 of those from the newsroom), mostly through buyouts.

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Striking front page by the Virginian-Pilot today. And a gutsy editorial choice.

Also, Pilot editor Denis Finley defends the photo choice on the Tuesday front page.

Update: Pilot design team leader Paul Nelson on how the page came together.

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I’ve collected some front pages of the Virginia Tech massacres. Here are some Virginia front pages, here are the top 50 U.S. papers and some international papers. Update: I've added The Collegiate Times (above), the student newspaper at Virginia Tech. (Thanks, Colin!)

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I’m at the University of Missouri judging the College Newspaper Design contest with Scott Goldman of the Indianapolis Star (and SND prez) and Kristin Lenz of the Hartford Courant. Winners will be going up live soon here. So far, sex, caffeine and alcohol seem to be popular student newspaper topics. Who woulda thunk it?

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The Chicago Sun-Times launched a redesigned, more locally focused paper today.

As evidenced by the emphasized "Chicago" in the flag, they're beefing up their local orientation and adding more features such as
"Chicagopedia," a dictionary of Chicago words; "This Much I Know" where "interesting people tell you their secrets to a good life;" and "24/7," a 24-hour crime and mayhem roundup. The Sun-Times has been struggling in the Chicago market. Sun-Times Media's revenue fell 8.6% last year compared with the Tribune's 1.3% drop.

As far as the design, it will "make it more accessible, more modern and more readable for you, the reader. Because it's all about you."

Here's a guide to the new features. (Same thing here in a one-page PDF.)

Sun-Times advertising/marketing columnist Lewis Lazare writes:

Unexpected and uniquely local news stories will get top priority in the refreshed newspaper, which some ads in the rebranding campaign will reference as reflecting the "real Chicago."

Reflecting the increasing importance of the Web as a news resource, many stories will encourage readers to jump to the Web for additional specific content that might be tightly focused on Chicago — such as highly localized neighborhood guides — or links to the Web's best content on a range of topics.

Former Sun-Timeser Robb Montgomery's got a podcast interview with Editor Michael Cooke and Kenney Marlatt at SND posts a link to a video by Publisher John Cruickshank.

Outside reaction is starting to come in. Alan Jacobson says it's "one of the best redesigns seen in years."

With all the vim and vigor of Bakersfield, KC and Norfolk, the redesigned Sun-Times is bound to get some eyeballs, making the Chicago Tribune or award-winning Mercury News look like your father's Oldsmobile.

But my old friend Steve Rhodes, a veteran Chicago media observer and proprieter of the excellent Beachwood Reporter, is less taken with it:

Ho-hum. While there are some decent elements, it still looks like a dowdy newspaper. And those full-length photos of columnists are nothing but a distraction. But the real problem is one that every redesign faces — that old lipstick on a pig thing. Unfortunately, nobody wants to improve the pig. It's not that hard to understand. Campbell's can change the label all they want, but if their soup still sucks, their soup still sucks. If the Sun-Times — or any paper — wants more readers, you have to make a better newspaper (website not only included, but emphasized). And making a better, must-read newspaper means quality journalism, not "Chicagopedia" entries that purport to explain what words such as "buddy" mean in to people who live here. Redesigns always work around the edges, and in areas like packaging health and shopping news, but never seem to spark better ways to actually report on the city — and that's the guts of any newspaper. Just once I'd like to see a redesign that also gamed out an investment and redeployment of reporters throughout the city, instructed reporters to always wonder during an interview why they're being lied to, and, say, mandated that each reporter file at least one Freedom of Information request a month. That would be a newspaper that would show readership gains.

Also, a couple weeks ago, Rhodes reported:

When asked why the paper didn't invest more in the paper's website, Editor-in-Chief Michael Cooke was heard to say that nobody believes what they read on the Internet.

Yeah, that's the spirit!

Here are more pages from today's paper:

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Poynter introduced the major findings (video; text script here) of its latest EyeTrack study at ASNE last week, and it’s getting a lot of pixels, mostly because it suggests that people read more of a story online (77 percent) than in print (62 percent broadsheet, 57 percent tabloid).

Other interesting findings:

• Alternative story forms seem to result in greater comprehension and 15 percent more visual attention (30 percent in broadsheet) than traditional narrative forms.


• Large photos and headlines draw the eyes in print, but online, navigation bars, teasers and story lists get primary attention.


• Color photos and live, documentary news photos got more attention than staged photos.

Alan Jacobson, for his part, is unimpressed and says that if we want to boost readership, what we really need to is find out why people read what they choose to read and not simply how much of it they read.

Our research shows that content selection is the number one driver of readership, and that relevant content about pocketbook issues and health/personal safety trumps all other kinds of stories, regardless of form.

Eyetrack07 does not include any consideration or evaluation of these content-based issues. It's limited to what people look at rather than why they read.

The full report will be released in June.

One thing to note about their “people read more online” stats: The sites they studied, StarTribune.com and sptimes.com, tend not to split stories into many pages, unlike others. I gotta think that’s gonna have an effect.

By the way, kudos to Will Sullivan for illustrating his post mentioning EyeTrack with the perfect image.

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The Society for News Design has got themselves one of them interweb-log deals. Many updates about society doings and other things of interest. So hop into one of those internet tubes and head over there.

>SND Update: The Blog [SND.org]

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Mint, a new financial daily in India, launched in print and online today. Garcia Media did the design for both the print and online products. Mario Garcia writes about his approach to the design:

1. It should be colorful, like India itself.


2. Ideally it should be in a small format -- we did versions of broadsheet and Berliner, and opted for the smaller, easier to handle format.


3. It must have perfect fusion with the online product. And, in fact, I recommended from the start that this product should appear FIRST as an online newspaper, and then two weeks later on print. That is the way it will be. This newspaper is born as an online product.


4. There should be substance, but also quick reads.


5. Navigation should be paramount.

>Mint [Garcia Media]
>Have a (live) Mint [Garcia Media]

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I’ve been negligent in linking to this, but be sure to check out Alan Jacobson’s excellent new(ish) Best Front Design feature. He looks at a selection of the day’s pages and analyzes why he thinks they work (or not!). And now that he’s got commenting enabled, it’s even excellent-er.

(This link has nothing to do with the fact that he picked my newspaper’s front page today. Really. I had nothing to do with the page anyway. Really!)

Update: Jacobson and Quark are going to award $1,000 in cash and more than $1,000 in Quark software to the designer of the best front page every month. January's winner is Robert Suhay of Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot.

>Best Front Design (Brass Tacks Design)

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The new narrower, Mario Garcia-redesigned Wall Street Journal is out today. Free on the newsstands and online today, apparently. Romenesko’s got links. Here are some of today’s section fronts and a page about the new design from the reader’s guide. Here’s a PDF of that page.

Garcia says he was already getting positive reader e-mails before dawn. But for his part, web designer Greg Storey says “who in their infinite ivy-league 5th Avenue wisdom spilt McClatchy all over this morning’s Wall Street Journal?”

Update: Here's the full PDF of the Reader's Guide.

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Also, I've been playing around with something as a daily feature. Here's a page with the Top 50 (or so) circulation U.S. front pages from today.

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Oh, StarTribune.com! Why must you make my eyes bleed?

The Merc’s Michael Bazeley tells us why not only is this a visual disaster, but bad business as well.

Update: Boston.com did it today, as well, Heidi points out. Lovely.

>StarTribune goes over the top [Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley]

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Adobe's says they're releasing the much rumored public beta of Photoshop CS3 today. Supposedly will be available at Adobe Labs "in the early hours Pacific Standard Time on December 15." It's a bit past that by my Pacific Standard Time clock and no sign of it yet.

Update: Looks like it's here (registration required).

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Roger Black launched his new site today, including a weblog. Promises to be an interesting new space.

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If your bad managing editor wouldn’t free up the funds for you to make it to SND Orlando and you’re in the upper Midwest or Northeast, design guru Ron Reason is offering a couple of day-long workshops this fall in Chicago (pdf flier) and New York (pdf flier). All for the low, low price of 95 bucks (Hurricanes not included. Probably.), all of which goes directly to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (for whom Ron is raising funds via training for the Chicago Marathon in October). What a deal!

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Seattle Weekly says: "Do journalists in New York do any original thinking at all?"

Business Week says: "I ... was unaware of the Seattle Weekly headline, story or cover art."

Me, I just think it's funny (on several levels!) that on a cover about Bill Gates, Seattle Weekly used, not Microsoft's Comic Sans, but Apple's, er, homage to it.

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Left: Page from 12 T y p o graphical Interpretations, Willi Kunz, 1975
Right: Poster for the Yale School of Architecture, Michael Bierut, 2005

Did I think of it consciously when I designed my poster? No, my excuse was the same as Kaavya Viswanathan’s: I saw something, stored it in my memory, forgot where it came from, and pulled it out later — much later — when I needed it. ...

I find all of this rather scary. I don’t claim to have a photographic memory, but my mind is stuffed full of graphic design, graphic design done by other people. How can I be sure that any idea that comes out of that same mind is absolutely my own? Writing in Slate, Joshua Foer reports that after Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism, she was virtually paralyzed. “I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own,” said Keller. “For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book.” The challenge is even more pronounced in design, where we manipulate more generalized visual forms rather than specific sequences of words.

>I am a Plagiarist [Design Observer]

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Inspired by artist Laura Fields and critic John Berger, Mark Kingsley has a fascinating meditation (with many examples) over at Speak Up on the “collision” between advertising and news images. It’s a collision exemplified by Page A3 of The New York Times, where there’s usually a fairly in-depth international piece and a photograph. Combine that with the ubiquitous Tiffany’s ad in its traditional upper-right spot, and you get a juxtaposition that often creates an entirely new narrative about society, art, economics, politics and culture.

My early exposure to this “way of seeing” was first viewing the [“Ways of Seeing”] BBC series as a freshman in college, and then as a junior designer in New York. Even though they didn’t speak the language of intertextuality, the art directors above me often would tweak layouts whether one image was “looking” at an image across from it or not. And from that moment on, inspired, I began collecting magazine covers based on their overall narrative effect.

So ever since seeing Child’s Play, I’ve looked at page three of the New York Times differently: always looking for a correspondence between the narratives of news photo and Tiffany ad, a correspondence between text and image, or simply a correspondence of shapes.

>Laura Fields and the Page Three Sutra [Speak Up]

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Stephen Komives, creator of the much-discussed "Enough Already" page, sends along a response:

I removed the Enough Already page yesterday from NPD. It seemed to have reached the end of its useful shelf life.

It wasn't a very good page, really. Lots of unnecessary white space, a big 'To Be' verb in the headline. Not good.

It's been an interesting week. The "handout" obviously touched a nerve. It's clear the design community is divided over the issue of knock-offs, and it's a topic worthy of further discussion, and maybe some guidance from organizations such as SND.

The stuff I wrote in the handout was way over the top. It was meant to be satirical and provocative. I doubt anyone would have taken notice if it hadn't been. I felt it important to call attention to this issue in a dramatic way.

If this leads to a little more soul-searching before we launch into another Wanted Poster motif, maybe that's good.

But to the good people at the Daily Breeze, who got their feelings hurt, I apologize. They've gone to lengths to explain themselves and haven't shied away from the dialogue, and they have my respect. If someone from their staff would like to attend the SND workshop here in August, I'll pay the registration fee. I mean that.

It's not for me to judge them or anyone.

I heard from a lot of people this week. Some trying to point out more egregious examples, others confessing to having knock-off skeletons in their own closets, others chastising me for adopting a holier-than-thou posture.

I'm not really sure how to respond to any of it. I would never claim to be a better designer or more original thinker than the rest of y'all. Or pretend to be a watchdog for the industry, either. We know in our hearts what's right and wrong and when we are crossing an ethical line. My only advice would be not to deny yourself the wonder of new discovery, whether through design or another medium.

Let me also apologize to Starbucks. They're one of the nation's top companies in terms of employee satisfaction, they provide health benefits to their part-time employees (impressive), they offer a wide variety of coffees. (After this week, I think I need to keep my options open: I might just be America's next barista.)

For now I have to get back to work. The dreaded hurricane-season preview guide is upon us, for the upteenth time. But now there's pressure. I'm thinking, crap, I better come up with something different. I have a feeling people will be watching.

- Stephen Komives

I'll echo Stephen and say that I'm glad that Daily Breeze staffers, specifically Toni Sciacqua, the Breeze's news and design editor, waded into the fray. Mad respect, yo.

And, for something completely different, comes this comment from "chou" on the post about the Daily Mail's Guardian ripoff:

Speaking as a UK national newspaper production journalist... ladies, gentlemen .. relax!
Over here we tend not to get too hot and steamed up because a competitor has nicked one of your ideas.. it's seen as a form of flattery. And every single paper on Fleet Street (the single most competitive newspaper market in the English speaking world) has done it. The Daily Mail is especially culpable - but they are probably more admired for not letting pride come before product. See a great idea, use it. I know the guys on the Guardian's G2 section had a good laugh about it the next morning and just saw it as confirmation that it was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed. In the United Kingdom, these examples of borrowing raise nothing but a chuckle .. certainly not angst-ridden handwringing and cries of woe about what the world has come to.

We try not to get our heads stuck that far up our arses. Or asses...

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Stephen Komives, design editor at the Orlando Sentinel, came up with the above "page" (pdf here) after yet another instance of similar pages cropped up today:

Komives' advice (forgive me for copying his red type):

1. DON'T DO IT.
If you don't see the endless visual possibilities that design has to offer and take joy in the craft because of that aspect of it, you might be in the wrong field. Maybe try Starbucks?

2. DON'T DEFEND IT.
Please don’t encourage bad behavior. It feeds the cycle. We would never think to support artists or writers who graft work from others.

3. DON'T BET ON GETTING A JOB WITH IT.
A liar is caught faster than a one-legged man. We all see what everyone else is doing and where ideas originate. You can’t take someone else’s idea, especially a highly original one, and expect to successfully pass it off as your own.

4. WE'RE WATCHING YOU. REMEMBER THAT.

(Thanks, Michelle!)

Update: As regards the Daily Breeze page above, Jennifer Berta of the Daily Breeze said at Visual Editors:

We got permission from the Atlanta paper to pick up the package in its entirety but tweaked it for style and added some local numbers. They sent us the story and we found a similar graphic. We saw it and thought it was relevant information to what's going on in our communities with hundreds of workers and students marching into the 110 freeway and many more immigration stories to come.

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Now that the "Hot L" treatment has made its way from Montreal, Baltimore and Bakersfield into the much-watched Virginian-Pilot, look for this kind of thing on a front page near you!

I think this is nicely done. As Alan pointed out to me, this is an interesting counterpoint to the plagiarism conversations. There's stealing, and then there's using ideas you find elsewhere, adapting them to serve your readers. Sometimes a thin line, perhaps?

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That's quite a, um, coincidence there! And it's sparked a bit of conversation at Visual Editors.

>Such a thing as design plagiarism? [VisualEditors.com]

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Remember that little problem Quark had with their new logo last fall? They've tried again. The internets are not impressed.

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Hmmm, I've seen something like this before. Wish I could remember where ...

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You see Quark's new logo? I'm betting the Scottish Arts Council has.

(via Coudal)

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