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Case Study |The Wall Street JournalThe Challenge: The Wall StreetJournal is the icon of what a newspapershould look like. As a professor atSyracuse, I began each semester byholding up a copy of the paper and ask-ing my eager students to redesign it. Itisn't a surprise that the students tried tomake it “modern” by placing a photo onpage one. The most daring designed anew color logo, but the wisest studentswould effect subtle changes, usingbrushes, light colors, and thin strokes. Inthese cases, the design played in thechoir, while the texts and the contentwere the protagonists. In 1999 I began toredesign the international editions inEurope and Asia. The work was complet-ed successfully, with the introduction ofcolor and photography in both editions.Next, it was time to work with the meri-can “mothership” version. This was amore challenging task: more pages andmany more (mostly conservative) read-ers. From the beginning, the redesignwas a collaborative effort betweenGarcia Media and the Journal team,headed by Joanne Lipman, deputy man-aging editor, and Joe Dizney, art director.

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What we did: As ifresearching to write anovel or screenplay, the designers and Iengaged in visualarchaeology, studyingissues from the 1920sthrough the 1950s. Wediscovered visual motifs,story structures, andstorytelling that played amajor part in theredesign.

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What we did: Westarted by developingstory structures tofacilitate hierarchythrough the pages:each story was com-posed of specific ele-ments, depending onplacement and impor-tance. This helps tomove the reader fromstory to story, andpage to page.

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What we did: Oncewe had establishedstory structures, weconcentrated on pagearchitecture, movingaway from a rigid, six-column format, andintroducing some fivecolumn formats forsection fronts.

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What we did: Abasic foundation of theredesign was the intro-duction of a colorpalette. We made surethat when colorappeared on a page, itwas sophisticated andelegant. We used a fewsubtle colors consis-tently and repeatedly,including mint green,sky blue, and softchampagne.

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What we did: Arefined redrawingof the ScotchRoman typefacegave the newJournal a lookthat—althoughnew and mod-ern—did not takeaway from thetradition of thepaper. An avidreader would stillrecognize his reli-able paper in thenewly redesignedversion.

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What we did:Our main goal wasto preserve thatwhich is genuinelyand uniquely TheWall StreetJournal. At thesame time, weintroduced mod-ern elements suchas better naviga-tion, including anew panel onpage one to pro-mote interior sto-ries. Now thesenew elementsbecome part ofthe Journal’s iden-tity for futurereaders.