During my stay in Vienna, for the European Newspaper Congress, I had a thought that I would like to share:

In the next years I would like to avoid discussions like: “Will newspapers survive in the next 10 years?” Instead of that I would rather prefer to rethink the way we are telling stories and how to make our products (print and digital) more integrated and attractive.

For me, today, only one thing sure: Publications must capitalize on its brand, and for this we should keep our products in a very high level of innovation.

On the 11th September I will be in Copenhagen to give a seminar-presentation about “Visual Storytelling” at the Danish School of Media & Journalism.
More informations, like how to take part of it,  can be soon found at: www.dmjx.dk

→ This weekend I will take part of the “European Newspaper Congress” that will happen in Vienna, Austria. In the next days I will post updates from there.

35 Judges from all over the world were judging sport pages for the biggest News Sports Design Competition, supported by the SND (Society for News Design).

And great news! I got 2 awards in the category “Inside Pages/Special Section or Enterprise”. In total 8 awards were given in this category.

It’s a very good recognation for the first life year of BamS Sport.

Bellow the pages awarded.

This week I have the honor to receive, here in my office in Germany, the visit one of the greatest Photographers I have ever worked with. Leo Correa is one of the most versatiles photographers I know. His job has inspired a whole generation of professionals and is reference in South America.

Talking to him and seeing again his job, is impossible to dont think in the power that good photography has for print media.

His job can be viewed in http://leocorrea.net

I found this page (from a Swedish publication) on the tables of Syracuse, last month in New York in the SND Competition, and it called my attention.

The Center for the Digital Future (from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism) has released one year ago a study about the impact of the internet on Americans. One prediction made is that most newspapers from the US will be gone in five years and so the death goes on around the world.

Well, never ask a barber if it’s time to get a haircut, and never ask a digital center if they think newspapers will be around much longer.

How will newsprint survive in the long run? I think this is the wrong question. Stories will survive, no matter in which platform you are telling them. But talking about print, I think we wont have so many newspapes as we have now, but I trully beleive in the long life for the ones who make the difference.

It is true that in five years we will hit a generation of readers who don’t remember life without the Internet. And the only thing we can already be sure about our ACTUAL readers is that he or she today is already very tech savvy. They don’t offer you a lot of time. They don’t read the newspaper like Grandfather used to read – page by page, waiting patiently to get to sports. They see a story that is interesting and they go for it immediately.

This should be enough to make us rethink our way to tell stories. I don’t see any publication in the future alive (either print or digital) whithout using the power of Visual storytelling in a GOOD and INTELIGENT away.

Bellow a funny comercial I watched this week. Ipad x print.

Great news this week! I got 5 awards with Bild am Sonntag (4 singles pages and 6 pages in Individual Portfolio) in the SND 34th, World’s biggest news design competition, that took place last week at Syracuse University, New York.

I’m specially proud to win it with a popular newspaper and to put Bild am Sonntag as the second most awarded publication in Germany.

More than an award, it represents for me the recognition of the challenge to make high level news design in the language of a popular newspaper. Yes, it is possible!

And to make the week still more special, I got also an SND award for a cover I did for Correio Braziliense, a traditional newspaper from Brazil , where I worked as Art Director until the beginning of last year.

Bellow, the pages awarded!

Award of Excellence, News Design/Page – Inside

Award of Excellence, Individual Portfolio – Sports and
Award of Excellence, News Design/Page – Sports

Award of Excellence, Individual Portfolio – Sports and
Award of Excellence, News Design/Page – Sports

Award of Excellence, Individual Portfolio – Sports

Award of Excellence, Individual Portfolio – Sports

Award of Excellence, Individual Portfolio – Sports

Award of Excellence, News Design/Page – Sports

Award of Excellence, News Design/Page, A-Section (Correio Braziliense)

Rethink: this word should be written in capital letters on the wall of every newsroom. Take ordinary type of stories and translate them visually into extraordinary examples is an obligation for any print media nowadays.

For the last edition of Bild am Sonntag, we had the final of the “Dschungel-Camp” (reality show in Germany watched for more than 8 million people).

We wanted to tell the story of the entire program. How could we do it in order to don’t do the same of the past years and put together  50 photos with subtitles and lot of text?

Comics! A language that fits to the topic, to our product, public, and a different and attractive way of storytelling.

What would have been a challenging visual problem to show lot of photos, came into a great result and repercussion.

For this job i hired Kleber Sales, from Brazil, who I had in my team when I was Art Director of Correio Braziliense. Despite of being one of the best illustrators that I have ever worked with, Kleber accept the challenge to do all 35 illustrations in almost 24 hours. Great job. And great to count on with so talented and passionate people, like Kleber, who painted this master pieces in his aquarelle style.

Second page

Third page

Illustration in progress,  by kleber

This is the title of the very interesting report about german media published in the “Medium” magazine. It talks about how boring  German newspapers are telling stories and showing new different examples that are changing it. I was very honored to have 2 pages of mine illustrating the opening page of the report “Modern way of telling stories”.

I spent one entire day this week conducting a very exciting workshop (in Hamburg, Germany) for the team of Sport Bild Magazine, one of the largest circulation sports magazine in Europe.

During the course of this last workshop, we have worked together with the layout team and the chief editors on specific points of the Sport Bild project. The idea? Go trough all pages and details of the magazine, propouse changes and introduce techniques and new uses of visual storytelling.

The first results in the end of the day were amazing. It’s great to conduct a workshop for such talented people.

For this year, I will conduct (in different cities of Europe) a 2 days workshop about the world of visual storytelling. Soon I will post the schedule here.

How can newspapers hold readers attention?
“Newspaperwork” (from Belgium) offered 3 advertisers a private driver for 1 day, so they could read their newspaper.

This is not a joke.

This is how Simon McGarr, an Irish layer, started a post about attempts by the Irish newspaper industry’s licensing body to charge one of his clients a fee for linking to newspaper content.

I couldn’t believe on that, until I read the statement released by the “National Newspapers of Ireland” where they expect websites to pay to link to one of their members.

According to McGarr, the prices are something like this:

1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + Negotiable

We have seen lot of experimentation going on in the media when it is about new methods of making profit from content, like the leaky pay-walls at the New York Times or the API licensing at The Guardian. But its unbelievable how some in the industry, like this group of 15 newspapers in Ireland, seemed determined to accelerate the process and speed up the deaths of their publications.

This was the last page I made this year.
Thank you all who followed this blog during this year. It was 16.352 visits from 22 different countries.
I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.

This week I received an email from a designer I used to work with in a “traditional” newspaper in Brazil. He asked me about my opinion in regards to how the popular press could be so “ugly.”

I want to share my response.

First of all, when we talk about design, what is does it mean to be “ugly”?

Sometimes, inside the same newspaper, the standards of ugliness and beauty are incorporated into the same publication.

This week, an Editor in Chief from a magazine here in Germany, came to my office and invited me to conduct a workshop for his magazine. He was looking through some of the work I have been doing in the last 6 months for the popular paper Bild am Sonntag that I have on the wall of my office, and said, “this is an amazing job, but some of these pages wouldn’t fit with my magazine.”

This was true; and with this phrase in mind, I began answering the designer who had written to me. Newspaper design is more organic than any abstract theoretical process. Each newspaper must have its own identity and personality. Newspapers must fit in with their city, their readers and the communities they serve.

Of course, the work I did for more traditional newspapers I worked for in the past, doesn’t fit with what I currently do when I design, for example, a page for BamS. A visual journalist should be able to speak in different languages for different audiences. (It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t try to change many of the things I see in the popular press in general. But it’s not about being ugly; I’m not making it for me. Sometimes it’s more about making something more readable or simply more conceptual and attractive).

But what calls my attention here in Germany is not the popular press, but some particularly traditional papers. I have the clear impression that few of them are involved in a conflict between “being traditional” and “being attractive.” But the two are not mutually exclusive! One doesn’t cancel out the other. It’s all about thinking one’s readership and rethinking the way one tells stories, making an effort to make it more engaging.

Love your readers. Write good stories. Make the information easily accessible. But don’t forget to make your product attractive.

This month we have the last printed edition of Newsweek (it is going all digital). Tina Brown, editor in chief of this magazine, explain her point of view about the failure of Newsweek printed editions.

The image above is an ad from Bild newspaper. The slogan: “Read the world’s fastest newspaper”.

In the last 10 years I worked in 7 different publications (as art director, consultant or making some kind of contribution) and all of them were mainly “traditional” dailies. This year I got, maybe, the biggest challenge of my career.

When I decided to move to a boulevard newspaper (boulevard translates “popular press” here) many people said that I would not be able to do anything there.

But of course I didn’t see it like this and took the challenge. After 6 months working as Art Director at Bild am Sonntag, I can say that there is a lot to learn from the sense of surprising and how these papers know their audience and focus on serving it.

As a Visual journalist and under my perspective, there are, withal, lot of possibilities and work on progress.

My first intention during these first months was to bring more concept on the visual language and connect it more with their way of storytelling.

I’m very proud of the first results and excited with all that is still possible to do.

Like Reuters last year, here’s a compilation of the most impressive photos of 2012 selected by AFP.

http://www.fubiz.net/2012/11/29/afp-pictures-of-the-year-2012/

Ana Dubeux is one of those talented journalists that makes you be sure that a Newsroom is a place only for people that are exciting and passionate about what they do. For those who can read Portuguese,  I would like to share  a text she wrote about our daily passion, right after we win the Esso Award.

“Todo dia, a mesma obrigação. Todo dia, a mesma labuta. Todo dia, o mesmo prazer. Difícil e penoso, o jornalismo diário é um esgotamento e uma redenção. Nós, que somos devotos desse cotidiano paradoxal, em que sacrifício e emoção se misturam na mesma proporção, lidamos com a rotina do inesperado. A surpresa se impõe diante de qualquer planejamento, que só às vezes prevalece. Aqui no Correio, uma estranha magia parece pairar no ar quando algo muito grave e forte, do ponto de vista jornalístico, acontece. Uma morte, uma data especial, um crime bárbaro, um superapagão, um enorme escândalo político. Costumamos mergulhar fundo, envolver uma grande equipe e, não sem uma dose cavalar de adrenalina e sofrimento, oferecer edições memoráveis.Alguns desses dias, ficamos especialmente felizes por entregar aos leitores, além de páginas notáveis, uma capa surpreendente. Nos últimos oito anos, impressionamos três vezes um júri mais exigente, que nos concedeu o Prêmio Esso de Primeira Página, o que nos honra e nos deixa profundamente reconhecidos. O último deles, anunciado na semana passada, foi a criação do designer gráfico Saulo Santana e dos demais integrantes da primeira página (Carlos Alexandre, Luís Tajes, Marcelo Agner, Plácido Fernandes e Varilandes Gonçalves), na qual me incluo com orgulho. A capa Adeus, Chico, com o símbolo gráfico virtual de tristeza, foi uma homenagem ao humorista e grande artista brasileiro Chico Anysio. A capa, um belo obituário de Chico, à época de sua publicação, foi destaque entre os analistas de mídia. O site Paper Papers, atualizado pelo jornalista e consultor espanhol Toni Pique e pelo repórter e doutor em comunicação pública Gonzallo Peltzer, publicou um texto intitulado Tratar bien a los muertos, no qual ressaltou a excelência do jornal. Parte, eu reproduzo: “Jornais excelentes costumam oferecer obituários de primeira para os mortos, cujas vidas deixaram marcas. O Correio Braziliense é um clássico da coisa”. Citações assim e a resposta dos leitores no dia seguinte, assim como o Prêmio Esso, são as repostas que precisamos para saber que estamos no caminho certo. Parte dessa história de sucesso foi trilhada por quem já não está mais aqui. João Bosco, nosso eterno editor de arte, a quem Saulo Santana sabiamente ofereceu este prêmio, foi um grande artífice das páginas do Correio. Ele mereceu e ainda merece todas as nossas homenagens.” Ana Dubeux, Editor-in-Chief, Correio Braziliense

Great news today! I had 3 pages awarded in the “European Newspaper Award”. 3 completly different topics: Politics, Culture and Sports. It has been a great and exciting experience doing the mainly popular newspaper in Germany.

Cover awarded in “Premio Esso” (Brazil) in the category “First Page”

From time to time, big topics comes along. It is usually something we couldn’t expect or plan, how the topic appears at your door, sometimes not even rings the bell and, suddenly, one is thrust in the most exciting experience that working for a newspaper can offer you. A thought-provoking activity that was not there minutes before.
You know you have little time for making it in the middle of a busy day, but it is too tempting to pass up.

It was what happened to me when I arrived in Correio Braziliense newspaper as Art Director.

The country was saying good buy to one of the greatest TV comedians in Brazilian media.
It was the first cover I made for this publication.

“Newspapers today, must grab readers’ attention and entertain the eye, as much as provide food for thought for the soul”

Win one of the most important journalism award in South America, means for me not only having a job or project awarded, but having the fight of how we should see newspapers today recognized.

This award reminds me the great time working with great people in Correio Braziliense. But specially my friend João Bosco, (that was art director before me and died last year) whom I dedicate this award.

It has been more than a month since I start to create the new concept for the new Sport BamS. An entire new sport paper that comes inside the Bild am Sonntag. The idea was to create a new graphic project in order to have an entire and separated new product inside the Sunday edition, but trying in somehow to keep the same language of BamS.

The first feed-back was awesome. Only in the first few days, more than 150 mails/letters from readers arrived in the newsroom.

Here are the new Logo / cover of the new paper and some pages of the first 2 editions.

cover / logo

statistic section

“speaking picture” section

inside page – infographic

inside page

inside page

I worked for a short time as Art Diretor for Correio Braziliense. Im very proud that in this short time we could make a great job and be in the final of one of the most important journalism awards in South America.

This page is about the death of one of the most famous comedians in Brazlian media.

It was, actually, one of the first covers I made for this newspaper.

# quotes, SND, Cleveland

# quotes, SND, Cleveland