Fine-tuning the ACBJ redesigns

Noted newspaper designer Mario Garcia writes about the redesigns of the American City Business Journals newspapers and how they are being tweaked.

Garcia writes, “Jon Wile is creative director for the American City Business Journals, a project with which we have been involved for over two years. I like the way Jon keeps track of progress for these weekly business newspapers. He collects the best of the best to reinforce and to promote good design and editing throughout the chain.

“We at Garcia Media have worked with Jon and project Pinstripe, rethinking 40 business journals to not just look better, but also embrace a digital first philosophy and reanalyze the role of print.

I contacted Jon for a follow up and progress report about the Pinstripe project:

“‘Pinstripe is almost three years old in philosophy here at ACBJ and about 18 months in practice. The design rolled out last January at the Silicon Valley Business Journal after restructuring the newsroom, redefining job descriptions and figuring out how print could be reborn in a digital-first news environment. We rolled out the redesign to the remaining 39 papers in about a year, finishing in April 2014. Now we are fine-tuning and tweaking, both on the content and design sides across all platforms. While doing this massive project, we also built a new CMS in-house as well as a new data research platform for our weekly List feature,’ Jon told me.

“How does Jon and his team manage to make sure that the good work of Project Pinstripe continues to evolve and to improve.

“‘I reach out to every ACBJ editorial designer on Monday and ask them to send me a preview of what they are working on for the week. I generally see about two-thirds of covers before they go to press. We also have an internal site that allows me to see a PDF/Digital Edition of the paper every Friday when they come out. I share the best pages from the previous week in my Monday note,’ he said.”

Read more here.