History
Borgåbladet is the third oldest newspaper in Finland with strong roots in the southern parts. In 2007 we won first prize in a competition within the "published 5 days a week"-category. The previous year we where third.
Work
When I was hired to Borgåbladet as an Art-Director back in 2006 I found my self swamped with work from the very beginning. Every spare moment I got I rummaged through the graphics archive and soon realized there was no real guidelines to follow. There had been so many different art-directors creating material along the years that nothing of the previous graphics followed any sort of pattern. So I was forced to make up a new graphics manual, even tough I was pretty much discouraged from doing any larger development. Creating the manual took me me almost a year to finish, as new types of material where flooding in, that could not be adopted to use the old templates I created, so updates to be made.
One of the first things I created was a Borgåbladet-add template series and introduced a few elements that would complement the look and feel of the newspaper. I followed that up with matching Plugs-series. Then I created an Image for all of the major products offered; The newspaper and the e-paper. The next on my list is to update the web-page to match the new graphical standard.
Creating all of this was a real uphill battle due to the fact that I am forced to divide my time between being an Art-Director, a Web designer and a technical supervisor. I'm used to multitasking but this amount of responsibility and work is at times overwhelming. But then again, I' we never one to give up.
I'we blogged quite a bit about my work and day to day happenings.
I' we consciously tilted the graphics towards a more modern look in small leaps. The customer base is quite old and big changes done too fast are liable to frustrate them. So I I have a 2 year plan. When I started in mid 2006 I used the time to get familiar whit things and to learn how things where done. In 2007 I started testing and creating material to see what will be cost effective and what works well in a newspaper environment. I will implement what I have discovered in the first days of 2008, when the newspaper company starts to implement its own more radical restructuring.
I was promoted to production manager in 2010, and my job description now also entails responsibility as a whole for the add department.
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