by Ole Munk; published 4 February 2009
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Our work with the ”Kuriren” redesign began in February 2008, exactly one year before the launch, when Ole Munk visited the city of Luleaa (just 100 km south of the Arctic Circle) to meet the staff, explain about the Ribergaard & Munk philosophy on improving a newspaper’s visual appearance, and learn about the redesign agenda of Kuriren. By that time, an in-house project group had already been appointed, including redesign veteran Jan-Erik Thelénius, design editor at Kuriren and the man behind several Swedish newspaper redesigns, starting with the 1970 Kuriren transition from broadsheet to berliner which Jan-Erik carried out at the age of 22.
The other two members of the group were feature editor Kicki Linna and technical whiz kid/creative wonder boy Klas Hallvarez. The five of us ran workshops and brainstorming sessions at Ribergaard & Munk’s studio in Espergaerde a couple of times during spring and summer 2008 and by August, a basic framework for the new paper had been established.

Our client had fallen in love with Guardian Egyptian, a new slab serif typeface designed by Christian Schwartz and only recently released for public sale. Norrbottens-Kuriren is the second daily paper in the world to use Guardian Egyptian (number 1 being, of course, The Guardian of London for which the typeface was made).
This typeface works splendidly both as a text face and for display typography, something which shows daily in the London original. So after a couple of tests, we decided to go against our original plan and skip the otherwise very well-functioning body text face, Charter, complementing Guardian Egyptian only with a sans serif. As Kuriren had been using Frutiger for a number of years, we found that a logical new choice would be Corpid, Lucas de Groot’s ”Frutiger 2.0” which we had successfully introduced in our worldwide Metro redesign of 2004.

A key issue of the project was that readers should be able to recognize the new tabloid as Kuriren and clearly distinguish it from its local rival, NSD, which has been a tabloid for years. Changes would have to be made, of course, but we would try to make sure that from a reader’s point of view, these changes would be seen as improvements, such as the division of the paper into two sections - and three sections on Saturdays. The work with designing a new weekend supplement was initiated by Maj Ribergaard together with Kicki, one of two future editors of the new publication.

Meanwhile, Ole Munk started doing sketches on a new logotype. This particular part of the assignment almost broke our hearts as we had grown a huge affection for the old nameplate; our client, however, insisted that the modern Kuriren look which was gradually evolving would call for a similar modernization of the logo.

Shrinking the format and restructuring the paper were not the only changes affecting Kuriren during the winter of 2008-09. In October, the editorial department had to leave the building from which the paper had been published for 119 years - to move in with the ”enemy”: NSD, the Norrbotten region’s biggest paper (circ 38,000, compared to Kuriren’s 25,000). As the two papers have been owned by the same corporation since 2007, sharing premises seems a logical way to cut expenses.
The third big change was joining in on the new printing press which also prints NSD, as well as several other dailies.

After a few more months of testing and refining, the time to present our new baby to the public had finally come. When we arrived in Luleaa on February 1, 2009, this near-arctic city presented itself from its most adorable and impressive side, with a clear blue sky and the ice road, which continues all the way out to the Bothnian Bay, crowded with people skating or just enjoying a Sunday stroll.
A very special Luleaa attraction is the giant ice sculpture being built every winter on the central square, representing one of the region’s characteristical animals - this year, an otter.

Jan-Erik and Kicki had been training the copy editors and pre-produced a number of pages while Klas - who had not only implemented the new design into Kuriren’s production system but also created a very inspired marketing campaign for the new tabloid PLUS the last front page in berliner format (image 3, below; the bottom text saying ”On Monday morning, you’ll have more space on your breakfast table”) - sported his creative talent once more by producing a (fake) goodbye-to-berliner poster which we don’t believe there’s any need to translate.

Everything went well - even the new printing press chose to behave on this very special night - and the new tabloid was celebrated with cake and champagne.
Readers generally responded positively; our intention to maintain the ”soul” of Kuriren was highly appreciated and most people even seemed to accept the fact that for the first week or so, some things might be a bit hard for them to locate in the new double-section Kuriren.
And as the procedure for cutting down the number of comics from eight to six had been democratic in the best Swedish sense of the word, asking readers to vote for their favourite strips via the internet, this often controversial change went down as well.
We will be monitoring the paper closely in the weeks to come and provide the staff with regular feedback by e-mail, and a follow-up session in Luleaa later this year is part of the deal as well.