Designing 8 December

The NRC Next started a design competition to create the front page of Monday 8 December 2008 so I decided to participate.

Yesterday's newpaper contained an article about printing on demand, user generated commerce and web-to-print where the 'personalization'-trend is explained with several examples. In the following article the newspaper announced a design battle to design your own front page for the coming newspaper on monday. Here is my contribution:

The front page I designed contains over 400 presents with a title saying "find the suspicious present". The design is follow up to a sad newsarticle of yesterday, about a school which had been evacuated because of a bomb-threat. Because of the traditional "Sinterklaas"-fest which was being hold on the school, all the presents at that time were suddenly 'suspicious' objects.

This resulted into that a team of explosive-device professionals had to research all of the presents, one by one (!). Nothing was found, and the threat turned out to be a hoax later on.

The children were to be asume devastated by the cancellation of the celebration day where they have been looking forward to for the past weeks. The school announced that the celebration of Saint Nicholas will shift to monday.

********** EDIT **********

I did not won the front page, but was 2nd placed:

"The front page of Sander Westerduin (the presents) was very popular amongst the editors of the editorial office who make up the front page 'cover'-stories. This front page could defenitely be used in stories like the warnings of anti-terrorcordinator Tjibbe Joustra."

Take also a look on

the article on their website with

their comments (in dutch)