Google generation 2

Para não esquecer como pensar um projeto tambén para a web. Esse, coordenado por Mario García é para o jornal La Tribuna. (a versão impressa).

LM

Por Mario García

Serious does not mean boring

I remember my first meeting with La Tribune’s director, Valerie Decamp: it was a lunch at a plush, but quite busy, Paris restaurant. The tall and talkative Valerie, whose newspaper trajectory had brought her to La Tribune from the free newspaper, Metro, knew exactly what she wanted, and how she wanted.

“I want you to make La Tribune very lively, colorful, full of energy, and full of news, analysis, and topics that the readers have not seen elsewhere, that is what I want,” Valerie told me two minutes after we met.

Knowing what the management wants is, indeed, the first step in what you know will be a successful project: a manager who is focused, knows direction, target audiences, and has no preconceived ideas that a “financial daily” has to be boring.

Valerie talks fast, and she wanted the project to move fast.

Fast it was. We began around May, launch of the new-formula La Tribune is Monday, Oct. 27.

Enter the new art director: Eric Beziat
One of Valerie’s most effective moves was to hire Eric Beziat as art director. Together, Eric and I met frequently, both in person and in cyberspace, to create the look that you see here.
Every successful design needs an editor who contributes ideas, and who is sure of what he wants: we found this in La Tribune’s new editor, Erik Izraelewicz.

Google generation

Por Mario García

La Tribune launches today: a new formula, Berliner format for the Google generation

Larger format: At a time when so many newspapers go smaller, La Tribune’s strategy was to go to the Berliner format, from a standard tabloid. I am an advocate of compact, of course, but in this case, the idea is to allow for each of the sections to stand out. “We want to make a dramatic change that is visible to our audience,” Valerie told me as we discussed the larger format.

New branding: Gone is the old La Tribune logo, in the Bordeaux color with white letters. In is a logo with a blue background, but “attached” visually to a navigator to the best “surprise” stories of the day.

New typography: The type combination now involves Verlag in its various weights, but with an emphasis on boldness rarely seen in traditional finance/economics dailies. Chronicle, an elegant serif font, is used as a secondary font, to bring elegance and contrast to each page.

Color palette: We tested orange before we went for blue, but it was decided that it would be good to have blue as the daily color, and orange for Le Journal de Weekend.

Efficient navigation: Perhaps the most reader-friendly element of this rethinking of La Tribune is the Page One navigator, called L’Essentiel, and that is what it is. Borrowed from the highly successful and efficient What’s News from The Wall Street Journal, it summarizes in a few lines, the top stories that are MUST READ for each day.

Advertising innovation: The new La Tribune will experiment with ad positioning. Already many of these ads have been sold ahead of time, including “silent ad” on Page One navigator, plus interesting display of various strategies as shown here.


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