dramatising sports reporting
projectTimes Sports redesign
clientBennett Coleman

Background

Since its first edition in 1838, The Times of India has been the oldest, largest selling and among the most influential English-language daily newspapers in India. The paper detected a stagnant or falling readership of some of its pages.

Strategy

The sports pages of a newspaper must compete with digital news and tv. We re-considered the role of a sports page: it is to provide analysis, and a rich re-telling of a sporting competition with a detail that cannot be absorbed in the heat of love viewing.

Solution

The Times Sports page dramatizes the game, condensing it into a storyline with the depth of statistics matching tv but readable at leisure. Thanks to the pervasive influence of digital sports coverage, far richer data sets are available to describe a game that at any time in the past. Moves, when they occured, are available; the challenge is to interpret them and extract the pattern of the game as a story, capturing the turning points.

Capitalizing on ‘dead’ areas, we introduced augmented scoreboards, an exciting composition of pictures with augmented narrative graphics focusing on the action or moment photographed for a hit of adrenaline-reliving the moment.

The infographics and masthead colors are from the tournament for relating it better with live matches; overall, a disruptive experience at the back end of the paper.

dramatising sports reporting

projectTimes Sports redesign
clientBennett Coleman

The Times of India is the leading English language newspaper in India. Its sports page is among its most successful sections. The editors perceived some decline in interest. Our analysis, which we agreed on with the ToI team, was that newspaper sports reporting must now compete with digital news and TV. The new Times Sports page sets out to fill in and relive the game, retelling it with rich detail.

an augmented scoreboard highlights key moments

These are the adrenaline turning points that sports fans remember. We saw the sports page’s role as fixing these in memory. Augmented scoreboards and augmented photographs fuse rich data sets that are now available online with pictures that freeze the action.

Beyond the game

Personalities, sports events, and the buzz around them get a series of devices that make effective use of colour and statistics to liven up the page.

team

Partner-in-charge & Creative Director Itu Chaudhuri | Design Development Niloy Kundu, Ritu Kumari | Project Duration 1 year

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