Mark Porter

While I was in Italy putting Internazionale to bed, the Tages Anzeiger (the other main Zurich paper) launched their redesign, hot on the heels of their main rivals, the NZZ.

I’m not going to say anything about the design because the images I’ve seen on the web are pretty low resolution and its hard to see what’s going on (there’s a gallery on the TA site , and some very small pix on Mario Garcia’s blog ). It’s not an easy paper to get in London but I’m in Switzerland next week, so I’ll get a good look at it then.

A curious twist is the story of the (unsuccessful) pitch by Information Architects, which they describe at length here, as it’s not often you see interactive designers tackle a mainstream print project. Some of their pages are very intriguing, and it’s possible that one day newspapers might look a bit more like this. But they remind me of those amazing newspaper designs by Massimo Vignelli — no matter how logical or beauitful they might be, you just know that no real-life editor is going engage with them. In the end, the job went to Tom Menzi, a former AD of the paper.

And as a postscript, I finally tracked down a copy of the redesigned NZZ (at Rome airport, I couldnt find one anywhere near the Guardian offices). There were some surprises when I saw it close up — mainly the introduction of some new fonts (Glypha and Univers Condensed I think) alongside the long-standing Bodoni and Times. Theres a conceptual logic to this (both fonts were designed by Adrian Frutiger who studied in Zürich), but some of the combinations of type feel very uncomfortable, particularly where the Glypha comes into play. Of course, this may be deliberate — the Bodoni headlines and Times text have alway been a slighty uneasy combination anyway, so maybe this is intended to build on that. Anyway, holding a paper copy in my hands hasn’t made me revise my opinions about the project. But then I always tell clients that you cant tell anything from instant reactions, so I’ll just have to see if it grows on me!