Ear­lier this year Swiss news­pa­per Tages-Anzeiger asked Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects, a Japanese-Swiss UX–ori­ented web design agency, to come up with a pitch for a redesign of their offline news­pa­per.

The result is a con­cept and set of designs that are sub­tle re-workings of what works for print, inte­grated with what works online.

The con­cept was: Use all knowl­edge from con­tem­po­rary user expe­ri­ence design and trans­late it to paper. Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of sep­a­rate media, while using the strength of the paper (pic­tures, info graph­ics, nice text) to the max. Keep the look as close as pos­si­ble to the orig­i­nal brand and change the guts of the design. Make a prod­uct that peo­ple want to buy because it is more usable that the com­peti­tor, not because it wins graphic design prices.

Basic rule: Ignore all rules of news­pa­per design to start with and keep only the ones that are use­ful to the reader:

  1. Opti­mize text for reading.
  2. Reduc­tion to two fonts.
  3. Scannabil­ity and print link.
  4. Order.
  5. Four columns for soft news, five columns for hard news, mixed 4/5 columns for sports. Ragged text for opinion.
  6. Big pic­tures, big info graph­ics, use the strength of the paper medium.

I am reminded of two instances where large infor­ma­tion visu­al­i­sa­tions were promi­nent on the front page of news­pa­pers: The Inde­pen­dent’s Mid­dle East cease­fire info­graphic and a Her­ald graphic depict­ing Washington’s $2 bil­lion bud­get deficit. It works.

via @mocost

Update: I knew I had seen this before and knew I hadn’t writ­ten about it here on Lone Gun­man before. How­ever, thanks must go to Andrew Smith for point­ing out in the com­ments that it was posted here pre­vi­ously: by the eru­dite Andrew Simone in his guest post, News­pa­per.