President of SNDS since 2013 and chairman of the competition Best of Scandinavian News Design since 2002, Flemming Hvidtfeldt, has died on Thursday, December 17th, 2020.
Journalist, chairman of the Society for News Design Scandinavia and former editor-in-chief of Nordjyske and Århus Stiftstidende, Flemming Hvidtfeldt has died of cancer, aged 66 at Hospice Søholm near Aarhus, Denmark.
Until the 1970s, the pages of Danish newspapers looked very different than today. Back then, it was often only the front page and a few other pages that made with a proper lay out and design.
That changed in the 1980s. Flemming Hvidtfeldt belonged to the generation of young journalists at the time who focused on newspaper design, and that came to shape a large part of his career.
From 1977 he was employed as a journalist at Vendsyssel Tidende and in 1982 he started working at Jydske Tidende as a journalist and later as a front page and feature editor. In 1991-98, he was employed by Jydske Vestkysten as editor-in-chief with responsibility for the newspaper’s design, and then he joined Nordjyske Medier as editor-in-chief, before becoming editor-in-chief of Dagbladet Ringkøbing-Skjern in 2005. From 2008 to 2011 he was editor-in-chief of Århus Stiftstidende.
From 2012 to 2014, he was employed as a journalist in Midtjyske Medier at the media house’s Public Content Bureau. In 2014, he became independent and established his own company and delivered articles to several Danish dailies.
Flemming Hvidtfeldt was for many years a member of the committee of judges for Newspaper Page of the Year in Denmark. In 1997 he became a member of the Society of News Design Scandinavia, SNDS, and the same year became a member of the association’s program committee.
In 2002 he became chairman of the design competition Best of Scandinavian News Design and in 2013 president of SNDS.
He was passionate about the design of newspapers, and the chairmanship of the Best of Scandinavian News design brought him as the organizer and guide of study groups with journalists from all over the Nordics to conferences in USA. Diplomas with his signature for “best design” in one of the categories of the annual Scandinavian design competition can be found at editorial offices throughout Scandinavia.
For the past 10 years, he lived for longer periods with his sister and brother-in-law in Åbyhøj. He married the Thai woman Tar and settled in Chiang Mai, Thailand, from where he also provided journalism to Danish media outlets.
In February 2020, he came to Denmark to attend a conference, but due to the corona, he could not travel back to Thailand. Over the summer he became ill, and his wife came and cared for him for three months before coming to the hospital in Skejby, Aarhus, and from there to the hospice.
He leaves behind his wife and two grown children.