The Grid, a free weekly magazine in Toronto, has been named one of the five best designed newspapers in the world, along with the Toronto-based daily National Post.

The two publications were named in the 33rd annual Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition from the Society for News Design (SND), which calls itself an international organization for news media professionals and visual communicators.



The judge's statement for The Grid states what sets it apart visually is "many tiny informative graphic details throughout the pages." The judges also liked that keywords are highlighted in yellow, and "small locator maps show where to find the spot mentioned in the presentation."

The Grid also "surprises with sparse but great inside photography on full spreads."

The Grid is a reincarnation of Eye Weekly, which became The Grid in May 2011. Masthead's sister publication Design Edge talked to Laas Turnbull, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Grid, for its Jan/Feb 2012 edition. "We had nothing in common with Eye Weekly — the way we approach the city, the tone of it, the way it looks," said Turnbull. "We felt like we really needed to make a clean break."

The Grid's logo, a black-and-white street map, is a clear reference to the city's grid structure. The design team envisions The Grid as a hybrid between a coffee-table magazine and a newspaper. Instead of cramming the cover with as many articles as possible, or giving disproportionate attention to a single must-read story (as done on magazine covers), The Grid has adopted a flexible, modular stance that allows each cover to be different. "We can put stuff almost anywhere. We don't have to go with the common trope of having the feature story be the biggest," said Turnbull.

Staying true to its name, it relies on a grid system applied to each layout. The typeface is Fakt, designed by Thomas Thiemich and inspired by Helvetica and Futura.

The Grid is a division of Toronto Star Newspapers. To read the full article on The Grid in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of Design Edge, as well as a take a video tour of the publication, download Design Edge's iPad edition of the issue.

The other top-designed publications in the world named by SND include Excelsior from Mexico City, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from Germany, and Politiken from Denmark.