A spread from the Daily Mail redesigned by Fredrik Sterner

This is a design brief written for the graphic design students at Central Saint Martins. It is similar to a brief I wrote last year, but applied specifically to the world of newspapers. Because it has a rampantly commercial premise, I asked the students to put their scruples and personal taste to one side and indulge in the manipulation of the reader’s gaze.

Background

As a modern-day consumer, our attention is a valued commodity and, like any commodity, it can be bought and sold. However, before anyone makes any money, our attention must first be captured.

A well-known national newspaper wants to increase the amount of money that it charges to advertise on its pages. To do so, it needs to prove that its readers will pay attention to the advertisements rather than simply reading the news and flipping the page. The editor wants to be able to guarantee his advertisers that each reader will “eyeball” every advertisement that appears in his newspaper.

The editor thinks about this problem and decides that, in the eyes of the reader, the advertisements are too easily separated from the fabric of the paper: too easy to skip over. The editor asks you to find solutions.

Brief

Explore the ways in which advertisements can be more closely integrated into the fabric of the newspaper. Design a collection of strategies that can be used to maximise the attention paid to the advertisements. Demonstrate these strategies by redesigning pages from the newspaper.

Considerations

  • The layout of the paper
  • The journey of the reader’s eye over the page
  • The relationship between the news stories and the products or brands being advertised
  • The readership of the newspaper

Constraints

Your source material is a single issue of a national newspaper which will be assigned to you. All news stories and typography should be derived from this issue.

You are free to work with the advertisements already in the paper or you can choose alternative products and brands that are more fitting to your strategies. However these must be real products, not imaginary.

Deliverables

A minimum of three double page spreads of your redesigned newspaper at the original scale.

Student responses

Some students found it difficult to engage with this brief, mainly because their good taste and finely honed aesthetic sensibilities held them back. (I must apologise to one student for assigning her the Daily Sport as source material. That was, perhaps, a step too far.) However, some interesting work was done. Below is a selection:

Bookland brief

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