First Prize for Feature Design

India's first International Newspaper Designing Awards were announced in late February, with Lithuanian business daily Verslo Žinios winning both first and second place in the feature pages design category. Verslo Žinios, a company within Bonnier Business Press, is the only business daily in Lithuania.

The first-place winning design, a feature on the reinvention of  bicycles for the newspaper's weekend supplement, won because "there was a clear theme to the illustration, there was just enough 'play' between the images and the nameplate, there was a limited color palette and it was treated as more of a cover," according to judge Marin Devine, who is a designer with The National in Abu Dhabi. The second-place winning design was on environmental issues discussed at the United Nations conference in Copenhagen.

"I'm proud of having an internationally acknowledged newspaper designer with us," says Editor-in-Chief Rolandas Barysas. "Senior Designer Vilmas Narecionis did a fantastic job on the illustration with some incredible detail in each of the pages. To me, each feature story front page is a work of art due to the illustration and copy working together as one. The one isn't drawing attention away from the other. It's unusual to make such kinds of illustrations for a business newspaper but it's worth doing as it strongly contrasts with the layout of other pages and readers love it."