Many Canadians waited with great trepidation – and startling visions of USA Today dancing in their heads – to see what would become of beloved National Newspaper and font of reason The Globe and Mail as it went under the knife of redesign.

Post-op, opinions differ on the soundness of the paper’s re-think, but agency Brandworks International remained on the high road in creating a campaign to communicate the paper’s evolution to the country.

With a Black cloud on the horizon and an imperative to evolve its means of communicating a quality message, the Globe earlier this month undertook a much-discussed redesign including typography, graphics and content changes as well as adding color to the stolid black-and-white face it had presented since 1844. Brandworks created the ‘Read Up’ campaign consisting of meaty inserts in the paper, radio spots and a tv campaign, created with TOPIX/Mad Dog.

Brandworks’ creative director and writer Tracy Jones approached TOPIX/Mad Dog with the project, which aimed to convey the philosophy of ‘enhancing the art of communication,’ and found a receptive partner in type-design guru Robin Len, the spots’ designer and director of animation.

The spots are designed to communicate the philosophy of the redesign and revolve around typographical and graphical elements. It starts with an explosion of text which begins to mould itself around the image of a reading eye, with key words, culled from the print insert created by the agency, coming to the fore. ‘I wanted to do a real stream of consciousness spot,’ says Jones. ‘It was high concept, not driven by the specifics of `Here’s the new type face,’ `Here’s what the new graphs look like.’ It was to get at the fundamental reason they were doing the redesign – it was driven by content and enhancing the reading experience.’

The spots grew out of the ‘Read Beyond Words’ print concept as a visual interpretation of the reading experience. The spots also centered around music created by Great Big Music, originally for the campaign’s radio spots. ‘That track laid the ground work for the visuals,’ says Jones. ‘It’s a very dreamy, trippy piece. When we were using it for the radio, we thought it would make good tv. It’s a very `visual’ music track.’

TOPIX/Mad Dog producer Lisa Weintrib says there was an immediate identification between the two companies in the approach to the spots, centering on illustrating the pleasures of reading. ‘It stemmed out of the philosophy of the art of communication,’ says Wenrib. ‘Part of that was to get into typographical, textural treatments.’ Len designed the spots using typography animations, live-action elements, textural treatments, multi-layered compositing and effects. The spots were created over about a month with After Effects, Photoshop and Corel Draw with some compositing and effects embellishment done on Flint.

In addition to Len and Weinrib, TOPIX/Mad Dog Flint artist was Marco Polsinelli. On the Brandworks team with Jones: Partner/director client services Lorne Kirshenbaum and producer Dee Anderson. Great Big Music composers are Tom Thorney and Carl Lenox.