It’s good to look, enjoy and design great/big visual things in newspapers.

I noticed some big things in estonian newspapers, which usually mean a big fotograph. When it comes to the big song festival it’s only natural that Postimees and Eesti Päevaleht had the same idea (how else can you show crowd of people and emotion. I don’t think that 6 column photo could achieve the same power). I would like to see more this kind of courage in estonian newspapers, even now in the tough times and not only in every 4 years during the song festival.

 

This kind of story happened to the American newspaper – Hartford Courant, which is actually the oldest persistently released newspaper in America.

In september of 2008 the newspaper came out with a new design, in which the masthead was radically changed: instead of the traditional horizontal masthead, there was the vertical one. At that time the newspapers’ director of design Melanie Shaffer said that they also wanted to put a reference to online, which meant they wanted to use dot-com in their logo. Shaffer said that during that time the change seemed good and innovative.

Unfortunately the readers didn’t agree.

The readers’ disapproval made the newspaper carry out a quick poll, in which they wanted to know what kind of masthead the readers want. 95 percent demanded the horizontal masthead. They got what they wanted.

 

This year they gave the yellow pencil award among the D&AD awards to the portuguese newspaper – Publico. In the category of magazine and newspaper design. New York Magazine received three awards in the same category.

This year they didn’t give out the black pencil award, which is more prestige. In 2006 the new design of The Guardian received the black pencil award.

 

The estonian goalkeeper Mart Poom announced about his retirement. In estonian sport this is definitely big event and also important to the newspapers or so I believe. The biggest newspaper in Estonia – Postimees placed Poom on the front page, so it’s clearly important.

In my opinion this is also important event to the newspaper designers and not only the designers but all the people who are active in making those current pages, because now is the opportunity to make those pages more interesting, bigger, exciting, powerful and visually diverse than everyday pages. Poom is most definitely worth it.

To add more excitement: you can compare how did the different estonian newspapers, like Postimees, Eesti Päevaleht and Õhtuleht, solve this problem.