Handelsblatt (2020 redesign)
On Monday, July 6, the leading financial daily Handelsblatt premiered a design that better accommodates its content while embracing its digital offerings.
The new redesign is the fourth García has been involved in for Handelsblatt. On his comprehensive blog, the designer explains the need to create a smoother design for a paper edition—more compatible with the shift toward online reading habits, “while embracing its digital offerings.” What has remained, García specifies, is the familiar logo and standard colour: orange. “However, almost everything else changed.” As for the editorial motives, the blog post quotes the paper’s editor in chief, Sven Afhüppe: “The optics help the readers identify sections better and to get through the newspaper faster.”
As García wrote in early June, Handelsblatt’s major transformation “includes the rethinking of the print design which launched today, as well as the upcoming projects for digital and mobile.” For months, Garcia set up an intensive long-distance collaboration with two designers in Düsseldorf, the newspaper’s hometown—design director Michel Becker and digital designer Henrik Balzer—and a team from Zurich agency Bodara, led by Tobias Peier.
Referring to the strategies developed for digital media, the new design focuses on facilitating the navigation of the printed page. Most editorial designers agree that a publication’s clarity starts with the judicious use of the “white of the page” as an element of its template. The design team for Handelsblatt has “incorporated white space as punctuation … to provide relief for the eye.” Yet the major element in reorganising a publication’s pages to guide the reader is arguably a more distinctive typography, using the range of the typefaces’ styles and weights to create contrast, and thus develop a lucid and less cluttered redesign.
Type palette: The main fonts utilized are Guyot for headlines and text and also Druk as an accessory font. You may see how type is used in these story structures that define how various type of stories are presented. Guyot is a type family inspired by the work done by punchcutter François Guyot during the sixteenth century. Ramiro Espinoza got acquainted with the work of Guyot while attending the Expert Class in Type Design at Antwerp’s Plantin Institute for Typography. Ramiro decided to give Guyot a modern interpretation aimed at the editorial market. Druk features the narrowest, widest, and heaviest typefaces in the Commercial Type library to date. “Druk was intentionally designed without a normal width, nor lighter than medium weights. Berton Hasebe, the designer, wanted to avoid shifting the focus of the typeface away from its most emphatic styles toaccommodate more general-purpose usage.”
Read more on the websites of García Media and ReType.
