By Rachel Chan

AS THEY say, the third time's the charm, and my paper has certainly got the winning look with its third incarnation.

The daily freesheet, a weekday publication of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), clinched a silver award for its overall design at the 9th Asia Media Awards, held last night at Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur.

Thailand's Bangkok Post won gold while Hong Kong's Sing Tao Daily got bronze. Given out by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, which represents more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies, the award honours both newspaper and magazine publications for design excellence.

Entries were judged on how design, including the use of typography, photography, information graphics and colour, is used to project content.

"The layout is nice and neat. It (my paper) doesn't have many pictures...but, still, the pages are not boring," said newspaper consultant Cheong Yip Seng, who was one of the judges. He was formerly editor-in-chief of the English and Malay Newspaper Division at SPH.

Three editions of my paper, from (top down) January 2008, June 2009 and December 2009 -myp

my paper first started out as Singapore's first free Chinese paper in June 2006 with a circulation of 100,000. In January 2008, it was relaunched as a bilingual product with an increased circulation of 300,000.

Until last November, the paper had two front pages, one for each language section. Both covers were emblazoned with a poster and the masthead featured bright blue and red. It then went through a revamp to reach out to its target audience: Young executives. Thus, it entered its third phase, transforming the Chinese section into a nifty pullout, with a cleaner layout and more stylised masthead.

Mr Yeow Kai Chai, editor of the English section, said: "Going classy is our clincher. We didn't want to lose our approachability but, certainly, we realised that our target audience are working executives on the go. So we kept everything sophisticated and readable, while still maintaining our knack for having an edge."

To suit the beefier content, which saw more commentaries and business pages, the design became "more sober, less graphic-oriented", said consulting editor Felix Soh. "We wanted to inject more gravitas into the paper," he said.

The result? A paper that has attracted more readers and advertisers. The redesign has improved the ad environment of the paper, which is highly important for a freesheet, explained Mr Soh.

He credits art and design director Peter Williams and his team for coming up with "ground-breaking design elements" that have made the paper an award winner.

Mr Williams said: "The most complicated challenge was to make the paper look uncomplicated. Smaller pictures and more text, as well as imposing a strict colour usage for infographics, have resulted in a clean look and feel for the paper. Ads and pictures pop out better."

my paper also bagged a silver for best cross-media editorial coverage at the same event last year.

Other SPH publications lauded last night comprise Berita Harian, which got gold for best in print (circulation below 150,000); The Straits Times (ST), which got silver for newspaper front-page design; ST's Mind Your Body, which got silver for the newspaper special section category; luxury magazine ZbBz, which won bronze for the magazine special-issue category; and The New Paper, which got silver for newspaper infographics.