Six months ago we launched Blendle, the iTunes of journalism, in the Netherlands. Using our service, over 140,000 users (that’s almost everyone in our country ;)) can read the best articles of every newspaper and magazine, paying only for the articles they like.

Last week we announced that The New York Times Company and European publishing powerhouse Axel Springer are investing 3 million euro to help us launch Blendle in other countries.

We believe that a big part of our success so far comes from our design: we think the layout of an article is as important as the article itself, and that’s why we invested a lot of time and money creating a premium reading experience.

Over the last 1,5 years we’ve made hundreds of sketches to figure out what paid journalism should look like online. The hardest part of it was that we had to come up with something that would feel more valuable than any other website. Because, why should you pay for an article that looks worse than an article that you can read for free?

We tried lots of different things, but every time we ended up with Flipboardish designs: beautiful, but without the soul of the original newspaper or magazine. A tabloid article should look a bit trashy, an article from a stylish magazine should look, well, stylish, and an article from The New York Times should feel like it’s an article from The New York Times.