In the style of an optometrist's chart, the greetings card message is eloquent enough.
'It is not the age but the mileage and condition that really count,' it proclaims.
It's a sentiment with which Dr Mario Garcia would doubtless concur. At 68, the US-based news media designer is at the top of his game, with the assurance which comes from having designed and redesigned 700 newspapers worldwide, some of them several times.
These days he combines his consultancy business with a role as senior adviser on news design and adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School in his home town of New York.
And as he talks up the need for photos and snappy headlines to meet the needs of an increasingly mobile audience, he says the '20-somethings' he lectures can be among the most conservative and protective of 'sacred' text.
"The idea of there being no text on the cover? People want to kill me but I don't care; I don't have to work any more, I even have a pension and medicare, so if I am doing this it's is because I have a passion.
"The only good thing about getting old is you don't give a shit what people think," he says.
As I write, he's in Bangkok, trying to distil into two-hour masterclass, what he typically shares with his students over 14 weeks. A keynote the following morning at the opening of Publish Asia calls for even more distillation, and has been brought forward as he has a plane to catch.
But the message is the same: Clean design, images and text geared to a pragmatic understanding of the daily news pattern and the time readers have to spend with each element of what he calls the 'media quartet' - the platforms of print, online, tablet and smartphone becoming a quintet with the addition of Apple's Watch.
The beginning of the era of "at-a-glance journalism" is a trigger for more passion and enthusiasm from the man who now declines newspaper 'redesign' commissions, arguing the need for the synchronised 'reimagination' of a news media brand.
In what he says are 'the best of times' for a storyteller, he is working with Copenhagen's Berlingske Media and the Stibo Accelerator incubator - driven by the parent company of CCI and Escenic (see GXpress March 2015) - on the opportunities created by Watch, the world's highest-profile wearable.
Nobody knows how people will react to having the device attached to them, or what news media companies can make of it, "but if you're not planning for it, you're behind," he says. "It will be a platform, and you must deal with it."
One aspect of Apple Watch is that it allows users to surreptitiously 'glance' at a headline in circumstances where pulling out your phone or tablet would be unacceptable: "It's like we did in high school, passing notes in class to say, 'Jane and Jeff broke up'," he says.
Ironically though, it's exactly the argument another generation of Garcias - Mario's grandson Michael, who edits a hand-drawn school newspaper in Tampa, Florida - uses against him.
Selling it for 25c a copy and focussing on the things school-age kids are interested in - including games, jokes and a lottery - it also pitches unusual stories, like a lead about 'Tornado Boy' not having a date which begs reader engagement with a hook: 'Who is Tornado Boy's date? You decide'.
Garcia thinks it's a natural for a tablet, but his grandson is adamant about the value of print: "This way they can hide it easily among their books and papers," he says.
And despite his enthusiasm for the other elements in the quintet, Garcia himself remains enthusiastic about printed media. In Bangkok, he takes listeners through a succession of cases where the impact of print could not have been matched by digital:
• devoting the front page of The Indianapolis Star (near right) to an editorial calling for religious freedom laws to be changed to include gays and lesbians, which prompted a 200,000-copy reprint;
• the "type attack' of Spain's El Mundo (right above) which gives bold text priority over pictures to spell out a torturer's chilling threats;
• full-page graphics on successive broadsheet pages of the Times of Oman (far right) dedicated to nominations and fashion ahead of the Oscars.
"These show how print can sustain a part and do what others are not doing.
"We are going through a transition," he says, citing the words of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos that newspapers may become a luxury item and "someday" the WaPo will not have a printed edition.
"Nobody can tell you that print is going to disappear... totally. The ones who are doing something about it are those who realise the print edition is not the protagonist, but demands a place," says Garcia.
Those that survive will have brought a digital mentality to print. He notes the revolutionary arrival of bullets in the New York Times the previous week - a device used by USA Today in the 1980s - and anticipates their role in platforms such as Apple Watch.
Despite the killing stares, he advocates newspaper front pages focussed on good navigation - lots of pictures and headlines, "not three stories with lots of text, but almost click-and-go, click-and-go."
While acknowledging that it is not for everybody, this is the formula he has brought to a new project across the 29 dailies of North America's McClatchy Company - centred on the Sacramento Bee - the first of which went live last month. Broadsheets and tabloids, some of them downmarket, get a similar treatment, with perhaps 11 items making maximum use of the front page real estate. "Text would kill about four of them," he says, arguing, "more headlines is better than fewer - something Het Parool and American City Business Journals do well - and the element of surprise is still so important."
He cites the Frankfurter Allgemeine which ran a front page picture of Marilyn Monroe (above left) instead of one of a plane on which an audacious diamond robbery had taken place, with the headline 'Diamonds are not just a girl's best friend'. 
That 'digital mentality' has brought unlikely changes: an 8.30pm deadline for Berlingske - and a 6pm one for the Ottawa Citizen - accommodate evening audience for their tablet editions; a nightly 'three-minute' mobile magazine talks up the weekly Paris Match; the unthinkable of pictures in Die Zeit end a tradition of using only cartoons; modest colour in the Wall Street Journal is later followed by much bolder changes - even the weekend use of the acronym WSJ - after it joined the Murdoch camp.
Garcia sees weekend editions as the future of newspapers, and says they will have a spirit of their own.
Nor is it only paying clients who get the benefit of his years of experience. A blog on the www.garciamedia.com website - periodically republished on our www.gxpress.net - dishes bouquets and the occasional brickbat to everyone from the New York Times downwards, and frequently leads to changes in the publications mentioned.
In Bangkok, he nods approval of a series of pages which took gold in the latest SND competition, in which "illustration won the day" and an NYT spread in which an online gallery has made it possible to run a single picture across two print pages, something of which Garcia says, "I thought I would never live to see it".
It's a process he clearly relishes, contrasting the attitude of one German client for whom he produced 11 full prototypes - "how many ideas can one person have," he asks - before making a communications breakthrough, with the inexperienced but open-minded digital native who took over the editorship of Norway's staid Aftenposten.
"If people come in with the right attitude, what's needed gets done quickly," he says.
"The best change is if you say, 'what if', and someone says, 'why not'."
-Peter Coleman
Comments