Editorial Design
Dagens Næringsliv (The Norwegian Business Daily) is the largest financial newspaper in Norway, and is recognised as the country’s leading media outlet for investigative reporting. No other publications have won the prestigious Skup Award for investigative journalism as many times as DN. The print redesign aimed to emphasize this position.
2019
Editorial design
Dagens Næringsliv (The Norwegian Business Daily)
Anne Brun (Creative Direction, Graphic Design)Espen Moe (Template Building)Frode Frøyland (Project Director)Gry Egenes (Project Manager)Bjarne Dramdal Erichsen (Project Owner)
The Saturday edition prior to March 2019 appeared visually similar to every other weekday, and gave the readers no indication of an extra elaborate newspaper product. A major goal, therefore, was to separate the weekend newspaper from the rest of the week. The battle for the weekend readers will be crucial in the newspaper industry in the future.
Furthermore, the new DN needed to appear as a more premium and up-market product. In the 2000s, the visual expression of the newspaper had developed in a very tabloid direction. This did not reflect the target audience of highly educated and intelligent readers. The redesign also aimed to appeal more to younger readers.
In March 2019, the Saturday edition “DN Lørdag” was launched with a white and improved paper quality – a drastic measure for a newspaper that has the financial pink paper as a hallmark. The pink color was brought into the new design as a printed color for identification, with colored columns that frame the spreads and force whitespace into a news layout that used to be very cramped.
The weekday editions got the same new design, but on the familiar pink paper with blue columns – blue being another signifying color of DN.
The new but classically built serif typeface family Ivar was selected to promote the premium feeling, and so that DN would look like the financial newspaper it actually is. Sharp Grotesk was chosen as a visual counterweight to provide a sense of breaking news and modernity.
The color palette, typography and design elements draws its inspiration from the archives, but presented in a distinctly contemporary design.
All examples in this presentation are actual layouts designed by the staff at Dagens Næringsliv.
I also did another redesign along with Anne Brun, the Friday lifestyle supplement of Dagens Næringsliv
