Your link line says "Continue reading New Strib pages."

Please spare us the bullshit. No one is going to read these pages. They are PFADs, nothing more.

As always, Robert, you are free to leave at any time.

This is totally unrelated, but what's happened to the Hartford Courant frontpage?

It's been inaccessible here for several days, and at the Newseum..

And miss the hilarity of designers claiming people can read pages reduced to the size of a dollar bill?

It's comedy gold. You should get a show on Comedy Central, Mark.

Man, I've missed you, WordSquawk. What a Dilbert you are. Get a life of your own and stop being envious of people who actually enjoy what they do for a living, regardless of what you think of it.

It does not say: "Continue reading New Strib pages."

Actually it says: Continue reading "New Strib Pages"

Quotes can indicate the title of an article or publication. So continuing means you are still reading the article on "New Strib Pages"

It does not mean that you will read the small examples of the pages. How silly.

Thanks for the tip, mw. Actually, I thought of inserting the quotes but decided not to bother. And I did already click on the link, and it simply brings up more dollar-sized pages. There is no more article.

You may want to research things such as this, mw, before you call people silly.

Once again, a design dolt proves that designers cannot win arguments because they have no valid points to bring to the discussion.

You're an asshole. Now thats a valid point.

Jenberta:

We've already established that designers have no valid points. You don't need to prove it further.

Hey! Hey! Hey! Pay attention to me! I have nothing to say, but I've got loads of anger!

Knilands, your last comment sums up what all of us have thought about you for quite some time. Now do us all a favor and go get hit by a bus, preferably a big one.

OK, Robert. I've warned you at least three times about calling people names on my dime. So we're gonna let you take a break from commenting here for a bit. Your two most-common IPs are banned and any post with your name in it will not appear until I approve it. Yeah, you can probably get around it. But I'll just delete it. Perhaps you can find something constructive to do with your time.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Flame wars suck. Grow up.

who's idea was the Dylan quote?

I hope it was a one-time thing and not some "quote of the day" that some poor sap on the desk is gonna have to come up with every day, and squeeze into an impossibly small space.

Wow, someone got a bad night's sleep, I'm thinking! Anyway, don't know if there is an easy way to accomplish it, but it would be nice to see a close-up of a page fragment, something which would allow us to better see the typefaces and how they are used (such as a close-up showing a snippet of a headline, byline and lede?)

The design overall presents a comfortable feeling - lighter and airier than the previous look. But what is accomplished? Does the redesign actually reimagine the paper? Did it result in new job assignments and/or descriptions? I wonder if a redesign is more successful if it considers more than the design itself, and instead views the whole process of gathering and disseminating news. I think the LA Times redesign we saw recently managed to do that. Do some redesigns happen simply because the people putting the pub. together just get tired?

Not that I am knocking that as a reason. Designers should be continually growing and challenging themselves and that ought to result in new approaches to design along the way. The only danger is in capitulating to swift-passing trends. I'm thinking here of the double brackets used on pull-outs in the redesign. Won't they seem dated in a few months?

Malcom, check out the redesign guide on the strib's website. I think you will find all of your questions answered.

Came for the Strib pages, stayed for the drama.

I really like what they've done in terms of increasing short reads throughout the paper, by the way.

Malcom,

I have the Strib page PDFs and will build a Zoomify gallery and place it in the Redesign Wing of Visual Editors - (vizeds.com/redesign)

I'm swamped at the moment - but will post it up soon.

The Zoomify lets you get in at 100 percent and study the pages and scroll around in almost real-time.

The Zoomify exhibits dovetail nicely with what Mark posts here on the blog. You get to study at a glance and up close.

An open letter to Robert Knilands

Robert,
It is clear what you need to do, brother. Start a blog.
You have an audience and a voice. Speak it.

As a gesture of goodwill, I have secured the domain name http://www.picassoforaday.com and will lease it to you for as long as you like - at no charge.

When you get your blog up (there are many free services available . . .) shoot me a message and I'll flip the switch so that PicassoForADay.com magically redirects people to your site.

Please consider this equitable solution - I think you'd have a lot of traffic.

Sincerely,

Robb Montgomery

Tom,

The quote thing appears to change every day, but it isn't always a quote. Today, for instance, it says The Jewish Day of Atonement ends at sundown.

It's an interesting idea — most things up there rapidly become invisible furniture — but I agree that pulling it off everyday could be a challenge.

Overall I really like it, but I dislike the lowercase section titles--they look a bit dated.

Mostly, I like the redesign. The typography is a big improvement. My only concern is all those screens, including a couple that on my screen looked kinda pinkish. Hope their presses can handle them. And a screen behind the editorials? Seems a bit like decorating.

Here's a question from a reporter-turned-instructor in a small J-school. The school is so small I have to teach design, too. I reported through most of the trends that happened since I left school, like the liberal use of cutoff rules to divide stories.

I like the Strib's new design partly because it doesn't rely on cutoff rules. I like that because rules create psychological barriers between stories and packages, therefore tending to box readers into a story rather than invite them throughout the page.

Something similar happens in cartography when you ask someone to estimate the distance between two spots on a map. Put a boundary line between those two spots, and they'll estimate that the two spots are farther apart.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Does the Strib's design, sans cutoff rules, create a more inviting feel for readers? Do you think it'll help readers linger on a page longer and browse more, rather than reading one story and jumping along? I know I feel more relaxed when I pick it up.

CRL

Tom, you hit the nail pretty much on the head about the quote. The fact is, for the first edition on the first night, it was a Longfellow quote. Only in the second edition did it become a Dylan quote.

It's going to do different things on different days. Ergo, the Yom Kippur mention on Thursday. Some days, it will go back to the past favorite: Newspaper of the Twin Cities. When it can inject some personality, the bosses will try for it. But whose idea of personality?

I'd worry more about finding a quote to fill the whole, if we deskers weren't twiddling our thumbs for two hours every night waiting for copy to move.

My nominee for the first day's quote was: Looks aren't everything. Somehow, that didn't get used. But it got a laugh from the deskers working on my side of the room that night.

Thanks for the Zoomify, Robb. And great idea on picassoforaday.com; I'll post some pages once Wordhawk has it up and running.

As for the Strib redesign, I plan to buy the paper at the out-of-town newsstand ... definitely the most interesting, idea-driven U.S. redesign of the 2000s.

Very engaging pages overall.
The big question I have is "What's with the all-caps quotes and the preponderance of wordy headlines?"
I've seen this in several recent redesigns (most notably in Mario-led redesigns) and it goes against two design standards I thought held pretty true. ARE ALL-CAPS HEADLINES HARD FOR THE READER TO COMPREHEND QUICKLY WHEN THE RUN ON FOR MORE THAN A FEW WORDS (ESPECIALLY IN THIS AGE OF THE INTERNET WHERE CAPS IS THE CLUE THAT YOU ARE YELLING A RESPONSE)?
My editors all freak if the headlines go over a certain number of decks or have more than 8 to 10 words. What happened to getting the point across quickly?
Finally, are these two trends just a way to keep consultants in business or is there a valid reader service behind this change?

My family of non-designers said yesterday they didn't get the redesign or really like it. They're daily subscribers. I'll have to ask around to see what other people think.

This is a bit belated, but well said, Rob. Seriously, who is this RK guy? I do not wish to insult anyone, and I mean anyone, but I think there are certain relics from the Linotype age who think designers have stolen their jobs -- just bitter, is all.

Guess what, our papers look better. (No offence to Linotype, those things are cool; no offence to its operators either: those guys ... man, we get angry if our "Enter" key is hard.)

Love the headline type. Classic.

Also, are they rotating the quote under the nameplate each day? That'd be a pretty smart idea and something I always wanted to do. It gives people another reason to check out the paper in the newstand each day.

"People love quotes." - Bartlett

Om...my question was answered up there, wasn't it?

(frickin frackin stupid adult ADD grumble)

The Star Tribune has been our metro newspaper of choice for many years. However, this we find this new format very difficult and unpleasing to read. We will not be continuing our subscription when it runs out. Sorry, we've enjoyed the Star Tribune up until now.

I am curious any readers know the headline and body copy fonts from the old vesion of the Star Tribune? I personally really like the new design though I'm not a huge fan of the paper's content in general. I'm also part of the crazy Gen Y audience that likes the funky look (just not the funky politics). Any help on the fonts would be apprecaited - you can email me. JP