Dr. Mario Garcia just completed his 455th newspaper design project -- the Miami Herald. His latest book — his 5th — is titled Pure Design. He founded the graphics and design program at the Poynter Institute. And he is, according to Kenny Irby, among Garcia's successors as Poynter's visual journalism group leader, "one of the most creative and prolific men on the planet."
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Bob Andelman
Mario Garcia shows pages from the Miami Herald's redesign. |
Garcia is president of Tampa-based
Garcia Media, one of the most high-profile media design firms in the country. And in the middle of one of the most amazing weeks in a long and esteemed career, he kept an appointment to speak with design professionals and graphics and photojournalism students in Poynter's "Visual Edge" program on Sept. 18, 2003.
More than 100 men and women were treated to an hour-long, behind-the-scenes peek at the Herald's 13-month-long redesign process, including discarded concepts, ideas and more support for his notion that in 20 years, all newspapers will be tabloids.
"I'm going to show you all the stuff that was thrown out and not used," Garcia announced. "It hurts to look at some of this that was not used, but you have to deal with editors, you know."
Garcia, whose redesign launched on Monday — exactly 100 years to the day since the Herald first appeared — really, really wanted his hometown paper to start its second century as a tabloid. "In my heart, this should have been a tabloid," he said. "We did it as a tabloid. If they had what we call cojones, it would be a tabloid. It's going to take a lot of people to die, to retire, to whatever, for this paper to go tabloid."
Among the issues Garcia was asked to consider in remaking one of Knight-Ridder's biggest newspapers:
- Cater to the reader in a hurry
- Content in the age of speculation
- The influence of the Internet
- The importance of good navigation
- Service, service, service
One of the most intriguing notions Garcia shared with his audience was that newspapers need more photographs, not less, and not necessarily large.
"Large photos are wonderful," he said. "Big photos are what it's all about. But there are people today who have pictures on their digital phones! Or they have 75 pictures on a screen and they will point to one and say, 'This is the one I want to send to my friend.' There's a whole group of people who don't mind seeing small photos.
"The time has come for visual briefs. Give the reader seven or eight images (in an international news roundup) from around the world. That’s the impact of the Internet. If you have a great photo, give it four or five columns. But if you have lots of great photos, run four or five of them small. There is great tolerance for this."
Keeping the Herald acceptable for Miami's shrinking Anglo, English-speaking population while making it livelier for Hispanic readers, Garcia said he enlisted two respected photojournalists, Ricardo Ferro and Maggie Steber, to capture "the colors of the city."
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The Miami Herald/garcia-media.com
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""You cannot copy the color palette from one newspaper and bring it to another city," Garcia said. "This is Miami."
Garcia also shared some of the amusing reader reactions to his work with on the Herald's "New Century Project."
"People complained about type size. They thought we made it smaller," he said. "But we didn't touch the type! It hasn't changed in three years!"
One of the changes the Herald made was publishing more obituaries in the paper.
"A reader sent us a note. He said, 'I love to read the obituaries. Those of us close to the grave do that. But is it my imagination that more people are dying since the redesign of the Miami Herald?' There are some messages," Garcia said, "that you just don't answer."
Before the seminar, Garcia sat down with Poynter Online contributor Bob Andelman for an in-depth Q & A about the Miami Herald redesign and more general conversation about his work. Click here to read the complete interview.
A while back, I pledged to post proof that obits...
