Charles Apple

The relaunch of South Africa’s Afrikaans-language national paper, Rapport, came off Saturday even better than we had hoped.

Every redesign has its share of problems and glitches. But this one seemed to avoid all but the tiniest of last-minute tweaks. “I’m so proud of you,” said redesign consultant Peter Ong when he viewed one of the first copies off the press Saturday night. “I could cry.”

Here, the editor of Rapport, Liza Albrecht, checks out a fresh copy along with group design director — and redesign point-person Arlene Prinsloo — and Jan Morgenrood, Rapport’s design director. Man, did these guys work hard the past few weeks to pull this off.

Here’s a before-and-after look. On the left is last Sunday’s Rapport. On the right is today’s front:

Here’s a closer look at the front. Click any of the pages you see here today for a larger look:

Rapport is the Sunday paper published nationally. The group here also includes three dailies published in Cape Town (Die Burger), Bloemfontein (Volksblad) and here in Johannesburg (Beeld).

Here’s the debut sports front, touting the huge championship rugby game held next Saturday, up the road in Pretoria:

Nice graphic by Jaco Grobbelaar, one of the talented visual journalists with whom I’ve been working. Jaco is based in Cape Town.

The business section, in particular, is barely recognizable. On the left is last week’s broadsheet section. On the right is today’s, printed in tabloid format with a magazine look:

Here’s a closer look at the front:

The superbly talented Elsolet Joubert turned out a number of very nice pieces for the debut Sake24 tab, including this look at the motor vehicle industry in South Africa:

Even better, Elsolet designed this wonderful piece on international trade and tariffs:

Elsolet has obviously been paying attention when we’ve been teaching her and the other visual journalists about packaging and keeping graphics clean and simple. In addition, though, she’s picked up Adobe Illustrator very, very quickly. Until three or four weeks ago, she was working exclusively in Corel Draw. Egads!

Anton Vermeulen, the artist for Rapport, was very busy this week. Thanks to a rush of advertisers wishing to be in today’s relaunch paper, today’s Rapport was the largest ever.

More ads meant more pages. Which meant more graphics. Like these three, showing internet speeds in South Africa:

And the one at the bottom of this page, showing the flow of “illegal” aliens from Pakistan into South Africa:

I put together the sequence down the right side of the page myself Saturday afternoon. Those are actual photos of a smuggling operation shot by a former law enforcement agent who smelled a rat and chased behind government officials in BMWs and minivans with false license tags. Step seven, at the bottom, consisted of mysterious officials showing up at the former agent’s office, demanding he surrender his camera — and the evidence.

Which he did not, evidently.

And there’s this tiny little two-column piece on malaria problems around the country. Please note the little mosquito that’s sucking the red out of the black pointer box:

What fun.

As it turned out, I ended up with four bylines myself in today’s paper. In addition to the Pakistani piece above, I built the timeline across the bottom of this biz page detailing the life of a retiring grocer store magnate…

…this simple grid that asks area shopping center leaders: Where do they spend their money? The answer: Anywhere they want.

Yeah, I wrote the headline on that one. I wrote it in English. The Sake24 editors then translated it back into Afrikaans.

I also built this big grid of participants in a big golf tournament in Sun City. The grid ran on the back page of sports:

Once we put the paper to bed, a number of us drove out to the printing plant on the eastern edge of Johannesburg to see the first copies come off the presses:

The folks there used all sorts of super-cool Star Trek-like devices to monitor ink flow and registration.

South African readers expect color throughout their newspapers and the folks in this company give them that color. When I see all the color ads in these papers, I wonder why U.S. papers haven’t invested more money on presses. You can’t sell color ads unless you have color positions, y’know.

Finally, the production folks pulled a number of fresh copies and handed them out like candy to the editors, reporters and designers in attendance.

Hors d’oeuvres, wine, champagne and fresh newspapers were served. And not necessarily in that order. Here, Liza toasts her hardworking team while Peter — at left — pores over details.

Everyone flipped through their papers and felt stunned — stunned that the ramp-up to this night was finally over and that the product looked even better than any of us had dared hope.

Here, my colleague and fellow consultant, Adonis Durado, checks out the A section.

Also there was Richard Phillips (left), one of the kindest gentlemen you’ll ever meet:

The official project manager for the redesign, Richard is the man who coordinates my trips here and serves as my liason. Here, he congratulates Arlene while his colleague, Werner, enjoys a little white wine.

And here is the design brain trust of the whole operation: Peter Ong, Arlene Prinsloo and Adonis Durado. Lots of folks worked together to make this project happen, but these three folks were at the center of everything:

After our return to our hotel, Arlene snapped this photo of me enjoying a tall Castle beer and a strawberry cheesecake:

It’s been an exhausting week, no doubt about that. But in the end, we’re left with a vastly improved paper that looks wonderful and reads even better.

Now, its’ up to the readers. I hope they like it. As much as I enjoyed this TV jingle.

Jippie, Jippie, Jip
Jippie, Jippie, Jip
My ou broadsheet…

You gotta love it.

And that was my working Saturday, my 24th day here in Johannesburg.

The plan for Sunday: Get up early, have a big breakfast with Peter and Adonis and then tag along with Peter to a huge nearby flea market. In case you don’t know, Peter is an incurable collector. I’ll be curious to see what he buys. Even more importantly, I’ll be curious to see how the hell he gets it all home next week.

Very shortly, you’ll be able to find a bigger report on the redesign, on Peter’s own blog. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 8:08 pm and is filed under International newspapers, Redesigns, Travelogue, Trip to South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.