Weekendavisen, New York Times win World’s Best-Designed at SND47

Citing experimentation and the skilled integration of visuals, judges for the 47th edition of the Society for News Design's Creative Competition, SND47, crowned Denmark's Weekendavisen as World's Best-Designed Print Newspaper and the New York Times as World's Best-Designed Digital Presence.

World's Best-Designed is the highest designation a publication may receive from SND and is awarded for overall excellence. Judges evaluated the entries on visual storytelling; use of resources including photography; illustration; infographics; news judgment; creative range; execution and voice.

"This award is the pinnacle that SND can bestow upon a publication as a whole," said Jon Wile, SND President and VP/Design at American City Business Journals. "This award is more than just a design award: It is a measure for the excellence of an entire organization. It represents a newsroom's strength since great design builds upon an organization's versatility, planning, depth of coverage, eyewitness reporting and photography, keen understanding of its audience, and true collaboration across disciplines."

World's Best-Designed Print Newspaper

Judges selected Weekendavisen as the World's Best-Designed Print Newspaper as a reward for the publication's embrace of experimentation and joy.

"Weekendavisen is moving in the direction I want print to go towards," one judge said during discussion.

The judges were repeatedly inspired by the novel ways the paper continued to delight them, such as small illustrations that evoked "a moment of joy," the unique way designers played with their brand font in an illustration, and the fact that Weekendavisen's covers "are easily the best of the [World's Best-Designed] group."

They praised how the paper was "really intentional about how they include their visuals" and the fact that "this shows you can still be playful and bright."

Founded in 1749, Weekendavisen is delivered every Friday to subscribers primarily based in Denmark.

De Volksrant (Netherlands) and Die Zeit (Germany) were finalists in the print category.

The jury noted De Volkskrant featured the "best typography out of all the newspapers" and that its features sections had "a clear purpose of what they want to communicate."

Of Die Zeit, judges said the newspaper "seems to pace you all the way through. … You could read this for hours and just soak it in."

World's Best-Designed Digital Presence

Judges highlighted how The New York Times' digital work pushes beyond a strong baseline, making it the World's Best-Designed Digital Presence.

The judges singled out features like election maps that will become an "industry standard" and "tiny moments in the larger pieces that make them memorable."

"They're doing elite work," a judge said.

The jury emphasized how "design driven" the work is, with visuals and reporting working seamlessly. They praised the Times' ability to create immersive, "hard hitting" and "devastating" stories while incorporating personalization and interactivity that can "only be done in the format of digital."

"Thinking through a digital lens for a digital award, what does the work do that could only be done that way to convey what the experience is?" a judge mused while observing that interactivity was a defining quality of the Times' submission.

The jury also pointed to the growing agency of visual teams and stated the Times is an example of a future in which news organizations "give visual journalists more agency and push visual-first stories."

ProPublica, The Pudding and The Washington Post were finalists in the digital category.

About World's Best-Designed

The World's Best-Designed judges worked in the San Francisco Bay Area at Clark Kerr Campus at U.C. Berkeley. Nicole Vas, a Los Angeles Times Senior Art Director, acted as the jury's impartial team captain, ensuring the judges understood the rules for championing, debating and voting on publications vying for the award without coloring their choices.

The jury evaluated the entries across multiple rounds, slowly reducing the number of candidates until a set of finalists emerged in both the print and digital categories.

"Before the voting rounds began, the judges gathered to review the description and criteria for World's Best, and we had a discussion to put that into context of what they were looking for as a judging team," Vas said. "So even though in the first round each judge looked at the entries independently … they had a sense of everyone's thought process going into it.

"The rest of the rounds were structured to give judges time for a closer look at the remaining entries," she added. "Part of my job as captain was to take the temperature of the room and advance the discussion when the judges felt ready, and when we reached the stage of championing finalists, there was a pretty clear difference in energy around the entries that ultimately rose to that level."

As captain, Vas was in a perfect position to observe and cast light retrospectively on what defined the jury's standards and what drove their final decisions.

"The judges didn't take the context of what is happening in our industry lightly, acknowledging shrinking page counts and changing resources, as well as putting publications in context of the different audiences they serve," Vas said.

"'Delight' is a word I heard multiple times in the entries that rose to the finalist stage," she concluded. "But I think the judges also maintained a high degree of rigor at each level, taking note of missed opportunities that held weight in making the final cuts."

Although the judges selected just one winner in each category this year, the rules allow for multiple winners in both categories.

To become a winner, an entry must be included on 75% of the panel's ballots. The number of ballots varied by entry because of conflicts of interest, in which a judge abstained from voting.

The full list of SND47 award winners is online. SND revealed the winners of Best In Show on April 28 and of World's Best Designer and World's Best Emerging Designer on April 29.