Top print and web newspaper designs

Here are the newspapers most often cited by the designers: The Guardian (UK), Poklitiken (Denmark), Bergens Tidende (Norway), St Petersburg Times (US), Eleftheros Typos (Greece), De Morgen (Belgium), elEconomista (Spain), Excelsior (Mexico), Expreso (Portugal) and Äripäev (Estonia).

The newspaper websites most often cited were www.elpais.com (Spain), www.guardian.co.uk (UK), www.globeandmail.com (Canada), www.24sata.hr (Croatia), and www.timesonline.co.uk (UK).

The results are included in a chapter on the Œfusion² of print and web design, one of the key trends examined in the just-released Trends in Newsroom 2008, the annual publication of innovative ideas for newspapers in the digital age from the World Editors Forum.

More on the report can be found at www.trends-in-newsrooms.org/home.php.

“Over the past decade, newspaper designers everywhere have been emphasizing more images, infographics and colour on print pages,” says the report. “Now, a trend is developing in which elements of newspapers' print and online versions blend into one another.”

The examples chosen by the designers are those they consider the best newspaper and online newspaper designs of 2006 and 2007. The five are Jördas Guzman Bulha of Welt am Sonntag in Germany, Lucie Lacava, one of the most notable and prolific print designers working internationally, Robb Montgomery, CEO of Visual Editors and former visual editor for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, Peter Ong, an Australian-based designer with clients throughout Asia and the Pacific, and Ally Palmer, a founding director of Canada-based Palmer Watson, which has created internationally acclaimed designs for newspapers around the world.

Fusion design is just one of the developments covered in Trends in Newsrooms, which draws from the year-long discussions among editors on the Editors Weblog, www.editorsweblog.org.

Other topics and cases include mobile journalism, user-generated content, video and other digital developments, integrated newsrooms, training and more. The report also includes the Newsroom Barometer survey, conducted by Zogby International for the WEF and Reuters, which examines the attitudes of editors towards the future of their craft.