Interview with Ryan Bowman, Shakeup Media partner, and one of the FT redesign leaders

The design agency Shakeup Media has taken care of the redesign of Financial Times.

nt: How long was the process of redesigning such a well-known paper?

Ryan Bowman: Overall, it was an intense 4 months of work. I began working with Andy Davis, the development editor for the FT, just before Christmas last year going through a couple weeks of detailed discussion about the state of the paper and aims and intentions of the new design. After establishing the basic design vocabulary we produced a full dummy only a month and a half after our initial conversations.

nt: What are the major changes?



R. Bowman: The major changes are not, unusually for a redesign, purely aesthetic. The FT is, more than any other paper, a functional tool for its readers. It needs to be informative, concise and clear first and beautiful second. So, while the paper has been certainly cleaned up with two new fonts (Miller and weights of BentonSans), new colors, etc, the main changes are about guiding a reader more efficiently through an information-rich publication. As such, many of the changes were made in the interest of story hierarchy and differentiation.

nt: Is the new design more integrated with the website? How?



R. Bowman: One of the original goals of the redesign was to allow more interplay between the paper and the website and it does that by simplifying the web cross references and providing more opportunities to emphasize the close relationship between the paper and website (including reverse publishing, promotion...).

nt: What were some of the specific things you were trying to achieve with the new design? 



R. Bowman: With the FT, the content was never the problem, it was always about making all their brilliance a bit more accessible.  It was essentially about exposing the amazing work that already goes into the paper through simpler and clearer labeling and layout.

nt: The motto of the paper, 'Without fear and without favour,' has been recovered. Why? 

R. Bowman: The design changes are meant to enhance the paper's traditional strengths while emphasizing its modernizing potential.  The return to the motto of the original FT, launched in 1888, is representative of this dual intention.

nt: Many studies observe how people read less and less today; how did this play a role in the new design? 

R. Bowman: Well the FT has different problems than other papers.  It is true that people seem to be reading fewer and fewer newspaper in general (at least in the west), but the FT has a stable circulation and a loyal and incredibly well-educated and curious readership.  Even so, the previous design was making it too hard to read.  It was too hard to get to the golden center of the paper.  This redesign was about releasing all that brilliance by making it more accessible to the reader.  Andy Davis, the Development Editor at the FT had a nice phrase for it--"breathable design". As you flip through the paper, you inhale information almost effortlessly.

nt: The Financial Times, unlike other newspapers, is still a broadsheet. Are the changes done with this format in mind? 



R. Bowman: Designing a broadsheet can be a challenge.  The sheer amount of material on the page makes telling the reader what is important very difficult without the page becoming littered with untidy pieces of useless labeling.  We concentrated hard on simplifying the design because of this problem.  We also tried hard to take advantage of the extreme vertical space that a broadsheet provide.  Over the years, the FT had become too horizontal.  Pages began to look striped.  One of the first things we did was encourage the use of verticals to fill the space and make the pages flow together more naturally.

Page first published: 05.06.2007