Design awards: Honorable mention for Times

It's that time of year when dozens of judges from the Society of Newspaper Design pore over the world's newspapers and decide which are the best looking. The five winners, who can now claim to be the world's best designed newspapers, were announced on Wednesday. They are:

Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, Sweden

Welt am Sonntag, Berlin, Germany 

Die Zeit, Hamburg, Germany

Politiken, Copenhagen, Denmark

The Grid, Toronto, Canada

You can see a slideshow of each one here.

As usual British newspapers were under-represented. I was pleased to see, though, that The Times received a well-deserved Judges' Special Recognition Award for its 'visual story telling' of the Olympics.

The judges said: "It’s that level of detail that really separates this from other entries. It’s clean, well thought-out, and so smart. It uses the medium incredibly well, and in such unique ways. It was the most thorough and consistent coverage we saw of the Games. A true Olympic effort — and all done on deadline." Well done to design editor @jonhilldesign and his team.

The Times also won a Gold Medal for Magazine Design for Eureka. The judges said it was 'both beautiful and explanatory'. It is also, sadly, no more. The 64-page science magazine closed last October after 37 issues.

Another paper that caught my eye was the Gulf News with its confident and detailed infographics. If you want to see more, you can plough through the many categories on the SND website.