InDesigner: Jacek Utko

Jacek Utko is one of Eastern Europe’s most successful newspaper designers, and his messianic message takes the form of a question: “Can good design save newspapers?”

He’s the right person to ask this question, since his redesigns of several newspapers in Eastern Europe have, without exception, led to an increase in circulation and ad revenue, sometimes by as much as 100%. He’s also won the Society of Newspaper Designers’ (SND) prestigious award for “World’s Best Designed Newspaper” in 2004 and 2007.

I recently caught up with Utko at the Creator’s Summit in Tokyo, where he was presenting his thoughts on the matter. He has understandably been in great demand since first discussing his views at the TED Conference and later at Adobe MAX.

The short answer to whether good design can save newspapers? “Not by itself; nice fonts and pretty designs alone will not increase a newspaper’s circulation and advertising.”

Utko’s approach to newspaper redesign involves several key components. First, he stresses that this is a business process, not just about fonts and colors. He works with newspapers to develop a clear strategy, analyzing the market and the competition, and setting goals for creating a paper that readers really want to read. Editors are very much involved in the process and are urged to move away from trying to just run news exclusives and breaking news, which the Web can do better, and to focus on providing articles with information on issues readers really care about. Relevance trumps exclusivity in this approach.

Another part of Utko’s redesign involves something he calls “inner branding,” where employees in all departments of the publication are involved. Talking to staff in circulation and sales can help management understand what readers really want, and by engaging all the departments in a paper, there is a united effort in making the redesign successful.

Utko also believes print offers some unique advantages over the Web. For one thing, a reader’s eye is faster than a clicking mouse, and can quickly scan an entire spread, which may contain several articles, to decide what is of interest. Utko talks of the rhythm of a newspaper—for example, starting with a feature story, followed by pages with many smaller articles, broken in the middle by another feature story—offering variety and interest page after page. He advocates breaking stories so no block of text is very long, and so they provide multiple entry points for the reader, including many info boxes, graphics, and sidebars.

As Design Director of Bonnier’s business publication empire, Utko has developed a stable of art directors who understand his approach and philosophy and apply it to each publication. From Latvia to Lithuania, from Russia to Bulgaria, the success has been phenomenal, and the numbers tell the story that good design, coupled with important business strategies that give readers what they want, can save newspapers after all.

Utko’s principles at work can be seen in three different newspapers, below. These include incorporating short introductions to stories on the right-hand column so the reader can quickly scan and find articles of interest. Also shown is a general horizontal grid, dividing the page into top, middle, and bottom sections.

The flexibility of this approach is shown in these examples below, where the middle section can be expanded to give weight to stories of greater importance, including allowing a really big story to take up almost the entire page.