South China Morning Post's Relaunch

The SCMP is Hong Kong's only English broadsheet and probably one of the oldest English newspapers in the region, being 108 years old and all.

I used to read it in school (I spent most of my high school years at a British international school in Hong Kong) and to me, it was as good as any other English newspaper in the world. In recent years however, we've been seeing pretty horrific things, like place-holding "X"s on the front page in place of a block quote and so on. Having been in Melbourne and exposed to papers like The Age, I was pretty disappointed when I returned to what seemed like a dying SCMP. (That said - and perhaps I'm being nostalgic here - but it seems The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald now sadly share a lot of content, which is cost-efficient but makes it less "Melbourne").

Then I heard about SCMP's relaunch this year, which I thought was interesting because they were going The Age route (which was probably another paper's route earlier before it landed Downunder...) - there was going to be a special-interest lifestyle "tabloid" insert each day - e.g. Monday is Money, Thursday is Food & Wine (see their campaign mini-site for more). But I got even more interested when I found out that newspaper guru Mario Garcia's Garcia Media consulted for SCMP's relaunch.

Garcia Media might not be the only newspaper/magazine-focused design consultancy, but it is probably the highest profile. They relaunched papers such as The Wall Street Journal, and various major papers all around the world. A quick look on their website will tell you that they now do web and mobile components too. Sometimes these are just aesthetic design jobs, but most of the time they involve more, because for example, you need to work with editors re: flow if you want to change something in the layout.

I'm not sure exactly how "deep" this redo was, but Mario Garcia says on his blog: "From the very beginning, I was aware that this project would not be a mere cosmetic exercise, or another redesign... Instead, the task—and the challenge—would be to rethink the 108-year-old English language of Hong Kong for a new generation, a new Hong Kong and, of course, the new powerful and vibrant China." The last bit is a little vague, but you get the idea - it wasn't just a matter of playing with typefaces.

Speaking of typography, I found the relaunched SCMP a bit messy. I counted perhaps 3-4 different fonts and various versions of that orangey coloured font you see at the top. On Page 2, the only other colour used for fonts (aside from black) was tomato red, then later there was blue etc. I'm not sure I really like that headline font either. It seems to say New York Post more than South China Morning Post...

via The Mario Blog on Garcia Media

On the last page of the news section is a full page of smartphone snaps from the paper's photojournalists, all Instagram-ed and moody. They're soliciting photos from readers too - having a go at the user interaction thing and all, but I have to admit it was bizarre to find it at the back of the news section, rather than say, the City section. Innovation is great... but I'm interested to see how well this works out.

Actually, I'm interested in seeing how the whole paper works out.