In the end of August Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet hit the streets in a new design. The readers could finally see the results of a years hard work.

The art director of SvD Anna W Thurfjell write about this in the SNDS webpage:

The strengths of the newspaper are different from the online. On the web it’s breaking news, reports in ‘real time’, and the materials that are unique for the web, the strengths of the newspaper is to give ‘orderly’ to give a clear picture of the news, storytelling and the experience of reading the paper with a good layout.

 

I have concentrated the redesign on three different areas that we wanted to improve. We wanted to make a bigger difference between the experience of the newspaper on the weekend and on weekdays. The design of the weekdays newspaper is aimed to feel more compact, fast and a guiding and the design of the weekend paper is more inspired by magazine layout with more space, more colour and visual journalism like photography and info graphics.

Next big area within the redesign has been to look threw the typography in all levels on the pages. To me that has been like the engine threw this whole project. Sure the old typeface Poynter was working for SvD but it started to feel dated. To develop a new typeface for SvD has been a fantastic journey, thrilling, learning and I think we reached far above my expectations. Mario Feliciano is the typeface designer behind the new typeface for SvD called Sueca. A customized typeface strengthens what’s unique about SvD and a more modern, contemporary look as well as a higher readability.

Sueca is a family of serif, slab, sans serif, text typeface and typeface for listing.

The idea behind Sueca is to be able to talk with the same clear voice but be able to change the tone of voice in different section. During the work with developing Sueca, SvD had help from the design consultants Palmer Watson from Edinburgh, Scotland as the second opinion.

The third area has to do with modernizing the newspaper. Take new steps, improve the structure, the articles, how to present the opinion, critics and analyzes, how to present different kinds of content. To design it I have used colour, more different grids for the layout and developed the page folios. Maybe the most obvious is that the colour system is updated with more different colours and the way we used colour in the page folios.

In all steps, of the redesign, I have safeguarded what we consider is ‘the soul of Svenska Dagbladet’, I call it the DNA. I do hope this change is perceived self evident and not like a some cosmetic change. I don’t think that we can ever lean back and relax in our business. The development of the experience of reading news in different channels is the next big challenge for us.

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