At this weekend’s Offset festival in Dublin, one of the highlights came from much-revered editorial designer Matt Willey. Now art director of The New York Times, Matt has a faultless portfolio of brilliantly considered work on a raft of top publications (and of course was one of the founders of PORT magazine). It was particularly interesting to hear him discuss his redesign of The Independent, which was the first newspaper project he ever worked on. As he doesn’t give too many talks, here’s some of the things we learned about that particular undertaking…

The importance of not compromising

“I did a lot of fighting on this. I fought very hard for a lot of things.” Matt was full of praise for Independent editor Amol Rajan for his wide-ranging vision for the redesign but explained that he came up against various obstacles on this job, especially where vested interests in the newsroom were concerned. Matt’s brief was to try to return the paper to some of the elegance and class it had when it was first founded as a broadsheet and to differentiate it from its sister title i that was proving very successful with its short format news and magazine-inspired design. Having Henrik Kubel draw the paper its own fonts and working with La Tigre on a redrawn logo were all-important victories in the process.