It was celebration time at the San Antonio Express-News when their team, The Spurs, won their fifth NBA Championship
The San Antonio Express-News may have guessed that its local Spurs were going to win the NBA Championship, defeating Miami to walk away with the big prize.
Art director Luis Adrian Alvarez sends me the entire victory package they published right after the game ended and the players grabbed their trophy.
As you can see, some of the headlines for this special coverage are in Spanish. Alvarez explains why:
- "Uno más"
The idea of this headline came from Dean Lockwood, our Director for News Production at the Express-News. That night, when Spurs won their third game on the NBA Finals, he was on charge of the front page and, originally, he was thinking in use "One more" as the main headline on the page.
As you know, San Antonio is an American city with a strong Mexican heritage, and a lot of people in our community are bilingual.
When the front page designer, Emilio Rábago, sent me a PDF of an earlier version of the page with this headline, I thought he was joking. Luckily not.
And as far as I know, we didn't receive any reader complaint about this headline.
- "¡CINCO!"
I designed this page and encouraged our editors to run again another headline in Spanish. Close to the deadline, we tried different options in English and Spanish, but on the end, Dean Lockwood and our newspaper Editor, Mike Leary, came up together with this headline.
About the magazine and supplements
Our Assistant Sports Editor, Doug Pils, worked really hard to compile all the stories and photos we used on these products in a timely fashion. Chuck Blount and Jim Martinez, the Sports designers, with the help of Imelda Robles and Bruno García, features designers, took care of the inside pages and I worked on the covers.
About the branding (The Rematch / Redemption):
After the Spurs won the West Conference Championship, we had a meeting with different departments, like circulation, marketing, the newsroom and even our Publisher, John McKeon, was there. Everyone agreed that our presentation should be really bold during the NBA Finals. Dean Lockwood defined we should use "The Rematch" during the Finals and between him and Chuck Blount came up with "Redemption" for the different championship editions we had. I designed all the architecture we used during the NBA Finals on the newspaper, as well as the book and the magazine.
About the ASF page:
This page was masterfully crafted by Joaquin Herrera, a features designer from our team.
Recommended video: designing for multi platforms
Here is a video that I think will outline things that you already know about how each platform in the media quartet works (basically this does not include print), but which confirms many of the thoughts we share in TheMarioBlog;
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q75qRDA3dcU
