Interview with

Design Editor Per Heilmann, BerlingskeBy Lars Pryds

From SNDS Magazine 2001|1

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Happy days in Legoland 4 Full Stockholm program 6–11

Looking back – and ahead 12–13 The Daily: Any news? 14

Fortune: Vintage art direction 16–17 Adresseavisen: Urban cowboy 18–20

Berlingske: The new face of a grand old lady 22–24 SND GLOBAL: Network and education 26–28

Photography crossing borders 29–30 Graphic life in magazines 31

Tapola: It’s raining gold in Scandinavia 32

A one & B one The new logo, executed by design company E-Types, speaks in a quiet tone of voice, tugged away in the upper left corner of the front page. The Business section has an almost similar nameplate – these two being the only sections published every day.

The new face of a grand old lady Denmark’s oldest newspaper, Berlingske, has relaunched with a new name, a new logo, a new typeface family and a new ambition for journalism. We talked to the designer behind the visual parts of the change – head of design Per Heilmann.

n Berlingske Tidende has been short-ened to Berlingske; berlingske.dk is now b.dk; the old standard 6-column grid has been replaced by a straightforward basic structure with extra white space built in – and the old Aunt Berlinger now has its own typeface family, made especially for this relaunch of the paper.

Simplification seems to be on the agenda here – but actually, this change has been very complicated, and definite-ly a bigger challenge than when the paper went from broadsheet to tabloid back in 2006, if you ask Per Heilmann, head of design at Berlingske.

“Back then, it really was more a format change than anything else”, he says. “Of course, we didn’t just scale

down the pages to tabloid, but this time the change also includes a new way of making priorities in the journalism. And that has really been the fun part – redefining the soul of the newspaper and then creating a design for it ”.

The new Berlingske aims to attract the type of reader (now clearly defined as a 30- to 50-year-old, business active and ambitious – more often a man than a woman) who likes to read intelligent background stories, and who gets his or her breaking news updates on the web, mobile or tv. The journalists, therefore, must “take the story further” if it is to hold any value in print. The new design should accomodate this.

“Wider text columns give the newspaper a more magazinish feel”, says Heilmann, “so we now work from a 4-column grid, with fewer but longer stories on the pages”.

Lars Prydspryds@mac.com

Built into the design is the floating “empty column” – reserved for small graphics, fact boxes or quotes. It also has the function of creating white space on the pages, making them less compact.

Getting the visuals rightLonger and fewer articles force the editors to make sometimes difficult decisions whether to run a story or not, but this way of giving priority also goes for the visuals.

“Less images – more photographs” is the new mantra for photos in Ber-lingske, meaning – don’t print a picture if it is not a good photograph. No more meaningless Colourbox; no more mug-shots across the full width of a page, or even across two columns. Then rather run the text without any picture at all.

Continues page 24 E

whAt’s in A nAme? Berlingske is Denmark’s oldest newspaper and has had different names through the years:

1749 Kiøbenhavnske Danske Post Tidender 1808 Danske Statstidende1833 Berlingske politiske og Avertissements Tidende1936 Berlingske Tidende2011 Berlingske22

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sections Most sections have a cover a simple cover design with a strong photo and a descreet logo in the top left corner (below). One obvious exception is the Sunday supplement MS (above), on which the two-letter nameplate takes up almost one third of the cover’s real estate. It takes strong photos to compete with that, but the new motto for the photo department is ”fewer but better photographs” – on the covers as well as on the inside pages.

Berlingske SerifBerlingske Sans SansBerlingske Text ItalicBerlingske TypewriterBØìïùTUR¡?› á"ÑY≥,mæð¨2(_(Berlingske Dingbats)

the fun font The new face of the old lady comes in 22 fonts – four styles with three to seven weights each, complemented by a dingbat font with a few characters designed especially for Berlingske. However, Berlingske is a one width family – condensed versions, for example, are completely missing. They would be a valuable addition in the future, especially in the Sans branch of the family.

Design consultant and former SNDS President ole munk describes the Berlingske fonts this way: ”It is a collection of quirky details rather than an actual family of fonts. Take the dot in the serif lowercase r – in itself a funny idea, but it lacks any family likeness with other elements of the family”.

Per heilmann, Berlingske’s head of design, says his new typeace has a lot of character. ”I’m glad we now have a headline typeface that people will actually notice. This, of course, means that some people will like it, some won’t. But it will not be ignored like the old headline font was”.

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newcomers Two new supplements have been added to the Berlingske portfolio with this relaunch of the newspaper. PoLitiKo is published Monday with in-depth articles and analysis of political subjects, while Berlingske nyhedsmagasin (short: BnY) is the new glossy section 3 on Wednesdays, with special focus on Danish business leaders with a global touch. Actually, BNY is not at all a new product, though; until January it was a stand-alone subscription based publication with a 25 year long history as the only business magazine of its kind in Denmark.

insiDe The ”empty column” is reserved for extra info – small graphics, facts or briefings – and can be placed in any of the four columns across a page. This is the opening spread of the ”Globalt” (international) part of section one.

Graphics will be treated from a new strategic objective – which is actually aimed at the web. Instead of turning print graphics into jpgs and posting them into the web as static images, the idea is to produce interactive graphics for b.dk and then rework the better ones for print. To free manpower in the graphic department to work on these large projects, smaller graphics are now executed directly in Excel by research staff, and medium sized graphics are cut away as an option. There’s that word again: Priority.

easy to readOverall, Per Heilmann is rather happy with the result.

“The process was well thought out from the beginning, with staff working in groups developing ideas for both the content, design, and branding of Berlingske – in order to set the course for the next 3 to 5 years”, he says.

But things always take longer that expected, and the final weeks up to the launch on January 26 were rather hectic. But once outdoor advertising and time slots for tv commercials have been ordered and paid for, there’s no turning back.

One thing Per Heilmann is espe-cially happy about: not a single reader has complained about the body text

being harder to read than old one. Early in the process, Heilmann decided that if the new font family, designed by Copenhagen design company E-Types, would not prove at least as readable as the trusted Gulliver text face, then he would stick with Gulliver. Heavy testing of the new Berlingske Text font assured him it was okay to switch.

“We have had some complaints from couples who now cannot share the culture section and the main section of the paper (as culture is now integrated into section one), and I think we need to make some minor changes to the weather map. But the body text – no one complained!”

So dive in: the long, intelligent magazinish articles are easy to read. n

onLine The inline B in a roun-ded square is used as logo for all digital activities – as icons for the variety of mobile and tablet apps, and even as favicon on the web. A black and white version functions as a ”full stop” at the end of every printed article.

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E www.b.dk

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