Monty Cook, Baltimore Sun deputy managing editor/presentation & news editing and the director of the redesign project, graciously agreed to write a bit about the paper's new design. So, read on.

When the new design for The Baltimore Sun unveils on Monday, September 19, it will be a bold departure — a more vibrant look than any Sun published in its 168-year history. There will be more energy in the design, more color, more reader-friendly navigation, increased interaction and connectivity with newspaper's online site, and a distinctive new typeface.

Tim Franklin arrived as editor of The Sun in January 2004, and out of the many changes he began to make in his first few months came an announcement that he wanted a complete overhaul of the design of the newspaper.

The last redesign of The Sun was Roger Black's successful "retro cool" look that debuted in September 1995, a look that brought The Sun one of SND's "World's Best Designed Newspaper" awards in the late 1990s.

But the newspaper had undergone a 50-inch web width reduction, and as the 1995 design receded from its original mission — the hallmark doglegs began to disappear and modular design was taking hold — it became apparent that a redesign was sorely needed.

In October 2004, The Sun contracted with Lucie Lacava to act as consultant on the project, and it would be produced nearly entirely on-site utilizing The Sun's excellent group of page designers and design managers.

We wanted this to be a company-wide project, not just a newsroom project. We felt that design is most about form and function, not just for readers but for the company that produces it. It has to work on multiple levels simultaneously. So we also needed to assess some of the company's business models, identifying new processes, procedures and, in some cases, technical needs to produce a newspaper in the 21st century.

In thinking about what a new Sun should be, we thought about all that had transpired in society in the 10 years since the newspaper's last redesign. In 1995, CNN was the only 24-hour cable news channel. The internet, as a major medium for news dissemination, was in its infancy. You couldn't get email news blasts to your cellphone. No Blackberrys. No iPods, ergo, no Podcasts.

The culture had changed quickly in terms of the way readers were receiving their news and information, and we believed that was a big factor in flat-to-declining circulation and readership numbers for newspapers nationally.

The project's steering committee, which met weekly for nearly a year, began with a mission statement and a list of 11 key elements that needed to be addressed to ensure the project's success. The elements ranged from ease of navigation to The Sun's target markets — urban to suburban migration, young adults and African-Americans — to consideration of the effects of the Web and electronic media on story play and the news cycle.

We also wanted to let research help and guide content decisions. Everything that we wanted to do must be addressing a key need, not simply designing for the sake of designing.

We began in December 2004 by creating an online Reader Panel. The brainchild of Tim Thomas, The Sun's vice president for marketing and the redesign project manager, The Sun registered and empaneled more than 200 hardcore, seven-days-per-week subscribers of the newspaper who were willing to give us feedback on the promise of our giving them nothing in return. Over the next six months, they provided nearly instantaneous feedback on ideas ranging from changes to The Sun's logo, the usage of color, typefaces and content.

That feedback was rich, rich data that was so invaluable to our work as the project marched forward to the September launch date.

In January, we began a department by department canvas of the newsroom, assessing content and sections and ways we could improve the newspaper. These meetings continued until we finalized the content plan in June.

What will debut September 19 is a content plan that includes one new section — Varsity, a weekly tabloid on high school sports that will be individualized by county in our prime market area — and several refocused sections.

Our weekend daily features section, Today, will be themed. Fridays will be Movies Today, with a focus on films and movie news. Saturdays will be Go Today, with its focus on things to do in and around the Baltimore area that weekend. Sundays will be A&E Today, a comprehensive look at the arts and entertainment of Maryland.

The Sun's Perspective section, a look at the week in news, will be reborn as "Ideas", with a focus on trends, profiles and criticism and efforting to point readers to topics, issues and people that will be news in the week ahead.

Because of The Sun's rich history in journalism, there was a need to pay appropriate deference to the newspaper's heritage while trying to create a bridge to the type of publication needed in the 21st century. One way we felt we could do that was through our choice of a main typeface.

To that end, we finalized a contract in January with Jean Francois Porchez of Porchez Typofonderie in Malakoff, France, to create an original typeface for The Sun. The resulting font — which we are calling Mencken in honor of famed 20th century Sunpapers newspaperman H.L. Mencken — has its roots in Didot and feels like a typeface from the 1920s and 30s, Mencken's heyday as a journalist. Porchez's creation is at once elegant, bolder and easier to read. And while everybody's redesign claims fonts that are "easier to read," we have worked hard to make it so for our readers. We've increased our body point size from 8.5 to 9 points, and we've been able to do that without sacrificing story space. Our fonts for supporting information, captions and navigation are from the Nobel family, and our agate font is Retina.

We are using much more color, specifically color section flags, to aid readers with navigation and to enliven the design of the newspaper. We've chosen the colors from the environment in and around the Baltimore area. The grass at Camden Yards. The Chesapeake Bay. The light at the top of the Bromo Seltzer tower. The brick in the original 19th-century building at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The brownstones in the Mt. Vernon arts district.

We have also tried to approach design from the inside-out. We want to spend time on inside pages and provide readers the same signposts and hallmarks they find on the section covers. We are training designers to design pages as "reading pairs", or not to design the right-hand page without considering how the left-hand page is designed.

We put this product before 10 focus groups over a six-month period. Home delivery subscribers. Light readers. Non-readers. Readers in the city and in the suburbs. Even our own employees. We feel fortunate to have received highly positive feedback every time we've shown it. The universal themes are: love the color, love the typeface, love the navigation.

What's more important is that every time we asked if they would be more likely to read The Sun more often, the answer came back "yes."

And while focus groups are hardly scientific and merely a market snapshot, that reaction is all we could ask for: just the opportunity to get a few more eyeballs on the newspaper. We're carrying a nervous excitement for Monday's launch. It's a bold step for this newspaper. A bold step that we're asking our readers to take with us.

Monty Cook
Redesign project director
Deputy Managing Editor/Presentation & News Editing
The Baltimore Sun