More than 600,000 readers in Saarland, this southwestern German region bordering with France and Luxembourg, take their time with their daily newspaper.
A six-column broadsheet founded in 1761, the SZ, as everyone refers to it, relaunched March 20, after a six-month collaboration with the Garcia Media team (Hamburg office) led by Jan Kny, with Margit Meister and special creative direction from Dirk Merbach, art director of the German weekly, Die Zeit, another GM project. “We wanted a more reader friendly daily to better serve our loyal readers that follow us with a great sense of tradition,” said Friedhelm Fiedler, editor in chief. Fiedler, and a team from the SZ, led by Michael Dostal, project leader, came to Tampa and spent a week with Mario Sr. developing prototype concepts, not only for editorial, but for advertising as well. “We wanted to experiment with new advertising concepts, especially in classified,” said advertising director Katrin Schwarz.
One week after the first edition with the new look was launched, reader reaction is 95% positive, with 5% still missing the old format. “This was a special project for us,” said Mario Sr. “Here is a project that I first redesigned in 1996, then fine tuned in 1997, but now we have been able to take a good, thorough look at the entire newspaper, improving its navigation 100%, creating a more appealing color palette, and yes, even retouching the logo.”