I'm a month overdue in posting this. See below entry.
Anyway, Miguel Buckenmeyer writes in to discuss El Economista, which recently won "World's Best Design" at SND.
I received special permission to print this electronically. It can not be reprinted without permission.
How I learned to love Whitney Bold
By Miguel Buckenmeyer
The Spanish start-up business daily El Economista was named a World’s Best-Designed Newspaper for 2006 by the Society for News Design (SND). In lauding the financial paper, judges cited its easy-to-read, full-color format that engages readers who do not ordinarily follow the financial press.
Judges at the 28th edition of the Society for News Design (SND) annual competition said that “El Economista is a beauty, a true gem. It should appeal to everyone—not just business junkies.”
The “Ikea” of business news
El Economista was built on some interesting if simple propositions. The first is that business news should be for everyone and not just the financial elite or business titans. The second is that design is a fundamental aspect of a strategy that seeks to reach nontraditional and younger readers. Third, “readers” today have very little time to devote to reading any one medium. As a corollary, information should be transmitted as simply and succinctly as possible through graphics, sidebars and short bits of information. Ironically, business information—with its lack of interesting photography and heavy reliance on data—created an interesting opportunity to test these propositions and communicate financial and business news in a highly visual way.
Based on these premises, the former editor of El Economista, Carlos Salas, and I embarked on the “Ikea” strategy of delivering easy-to-read financial news with a hip and modern Mediterranean design to the masses. We took cues from our partner and minority investor, the Italian financial daily Il Sole 24 Hore, which had built Europe’s largest-circulation financial daily by targeting small business owners, professionals, lawyers, accountants and self-employed workers. In Spain, the same segment of the population has been all but ignored by the business press, which tends to produce dry, arcane, press release-driven reports.
Our main goal was to create a “friendly” and easy-to-read business newspaper. We received a consultant prototype that did not reflect this objective. I redesigned the prototype during a three-month period prior to the launch of the paper. In addition to getting a higher story count on each page, El Economista wanted to make its news and information hierarchies as clear and strong as possible. In particular, the four principal features of the design – typography, color, illustration and infographic and sidebar treatment were all designed to transmit the simplicity and accessibility of the written content.
El Economista used as its principal source of identity the bold “san serif” typeface Whitney, designed by the type foundry Hoefler Frere Jones. Our prototype used Whitney bold for most headlines and lighter versions of the font for many other elements such as infographics, sidebars, and captions. Whitney can best be described as a powerful yet friendly typeface. Although it is bold and serious, according to it creators, it is also “compact and efficient” with a warmth characteristic of the European “humanist” typeface tradition. We complimented this typeface with a “serif” font called Mercury, also by Hoefler and popularized in the 1990s by the American magazine, Esquire. Mercury adds a touch of classicism to the paper’s typography and attenuates Whitney’s slightly modern look that might otherwise be less appealing to more conservative readers. Even the newspaper’s masthead is set in the classical yet happy face, Bodoni Bold, which dovetailed nicely with our aim to be a friendly business paper.
El Economista’s color palette and color-coded sections also aimed to set a more accessible tone to business news, aggressively targeting younger generations more accustomed to reading free dailies and the internet. Although this alienated some readers surveyed early in the reader panel process, others were receptive. The color scheme – blue for the “companies” section, red for “markets,” green for “economy,” gold for “management” and the corporate color orange for all other pages and sections – also adds visual interest and differentiation that is not ordinarily available to business newspapers given their heavy reliance on economic data and mug shots as well as a tradition of classical, conservative design.
That same reliance on data created an opportunity to “design up” El Economista’s infographics and sidebars as a key mechanism for transmitting information and adding rhythm and interest to the newspaper. Its infographics are also color coded, combining the color of the section in which each infographic appears with a neutral, light beige. This neutral color appears throughout the newspaper in conjunction with the palette of blue, red, green and orange, and serves to mollify the aggressiveness of the four very different primary colors. The use of orange as the corporate color also marked the ascendancy of “orange as the new green” of the business press, according the Francine Williamson, the editor of Biz Designer, a blog on the design of business news.
Given the business press’s limited recourse to photography, we decided to pursue illustration as a key manner of adding rhythm and visual entry. Our task of illustrating the paper was made easy since we tapped Spain’s best editorial illustrators, who were able to depict often visually ineffable business topics in dynamic, humorous and ironic ways.
The SND judges--aiming to find “excellence from cover to cover” from among over 350 papers entered in the contest--awarded our efforts. “This very visual paper is well printed, well crafted, crisp and clean. Graphics and illustrations are a distinctive strength—from section fronts to inside pages. Typography is modern, with a classical feel. Color accentuates rather than dominates. There is a great variety of visuals combined with a tremendous attention to detail that creates an interesting fusion of freshness and seriousness,” said the judges.
Although El Economista’s design has been highly lauded, establishing a strong business model has proven much more challenging for the company. Nonetheless, El Economista’s attractive visual and editorial style has pioneered the future of the quality paper in Spain. Following its lead, other generalist papers such as El Pais and El Mundo have reluctantly added more full color pages, photos, graphics and tint backgrounds. No matter what the future holds for the fledgling El Economista, its editorial and design strategy has rattled an otherwise dormant newspaper industry and won many imitators.
Miguel Buckenmeyer is an editorial strategy and design consultant based in Madrid, Spain and the former art director of El Economista.
© Miguel Buckenmeyer, 2007.
Impressive blog! -Arron
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