Learning from failure

November 26, 2009

Here’s the story of an ad agency that tried to redesign a major newspaper. They didn’t get the job, but there is a lot to learn by studying what they tried to do. Here are the principles they followed (slightly edited; see original for full explanation).

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

These are great things to keep in mind when designing and laying out a poster. Some are things I’ve talked about here before, like the importance of not violating reading conventions. At least one idea, how they tried to make text that can be easily scanned, is new to me and something I’ve never seen before, but definitely seems worth trying.I don’t quite understand #5, namely the varying column sizes and changes in justification. They don’t explain the reasons for distinguishing between the different content.Originally spotted by mocost.