Mark Porter

It may seem pretty weird to anyone who doesnt know the paper, but I’ve been waiting for this redesign with bated breath.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung is the newspaper of the Zürich establishment, and its internal culture is ultra-conservative. Simon Esterson and I launched a new Sunday title with them 7 years ago, and recently returned to refresh it. But the daily paper has remained pretty much unchanged since 1947, when they changed from Fraktur (gothic script) to Roman type. To anyone who knows the paper or Zürich, this redesign is a big deal!

Before I continue, full disclosure: we had a few meetings in Zürich about the project, but in the end it went to the redoubtable Mike Meire. I was disappointed (it’s frustrating to miss out on a high-profile job, and there was at least a possiblity that it could have been a great assignment), but also relieved (the deadline was scary, I had a lot of work on and a broken wrist, and a strong suspicion that the client would not be ready to do what I thought it needed).

The context makes this an extremely challenging project. The NZZ is more than a newspaper; it’s an essential part of Swiss-German cultural life. The closest comparison is with the FAZ, but the NZZ is even more traditional and allergic to change. My editor at the Guardian has called it “the most serious newspaper in the world”. But it now suffers as badly as other papers from the afflicitions of the modern newspaper industry, and they have been forced, against their inclinations, to do something to attract a new audience. To make the paper fresher and more modern without alienating its more conservative readers is a big ask; through failing to adapt for so long, the NZZ is now damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t.

But I had high hopes that an extremely intelligent and respected editorial designer like Mike Meire could bring it up to date at last. And the results? Well, it’s what I expected, but not what I’d hoped for. The news pages go from four columns to five, and there are some strucutral innovations (e.g. an opinion page). Headlines look a little bigger and its slightly airier and more readable. But they seem to have managed to redesign it without really changing anything significant, and some of the elements which have changed are ones which gave the old paper its unique character. I’m not underestimating the difficulties, but I can’t help wondering whether this will be enough to solve the NZZ’s problems. I sincerely hope so for the sake of our friends and colleagues there. But I doubt that it will be another 63 years before the next redesign.