Newsdesigner.com | Concord Redesign

Concord Redesign

6:06 AM, November 18, 2005

The Concord (N.H.) Monitor has redesigned. It was an in-house job and launched Nov. 8. Editor Mike Pride wrote about it in a Nov. 6 column.

Mark Travis, the Monitor's director of product development, has been the prime mover behind the redesign process. From the beginning, he has worked with a team of editors and reporters eager to rethink how the paper looks and what we put in it.

Making the new look work will require change all around the newsroom, but the leaders of this portion of the design - the part you'll see on Tuesday - have been Ric Tracewski, the news editor, Dan Habib, the photo editor, and Charlotte Thibault, our newsroom artist. Vanessa Valdes, a new editor with superb page design skills, came late to the process but made a big contribution to the new design. ...

The driving idea behind the design itself is to simplify. You'll see fewer logos and color splashes than in the Monitor you're holding in your hands. It is our stories, headlines and photographs that we want readers to notice, and we've tried to strip away any element that might distract from them. We've also simplified the standard devices of our design, opting for less italic type and the most readable type faces we could find.

Headlines are Nick Shinn's Brown and Font Bureau's Poynter OS Display. Body copy is Bitstream's News 706. Mark Travis' column details all the changes. And Pride has posted a Q&A on his blog.

And a picture from the redesign kickoff is evidence that bakeries need copy editors, too.

(Thanks to Vanessa Valdes for the images!)

Comments

Heads up: After you hit "post" things may be slow and you may get an error. Most likely, your comment did post. Apologies. I'm looking for a fix.

This is the paper I grew up with, so naturally I have mixed feelings. The redesign is certainly an improvement - it's nice to finally see that hideous '80s clipart removed from the Travel section head, for example, and it's nice to see them tastefully limit their type palette - but I wish they had done more to address the structural problems in the paper. The front news section has never felt very organized to me, and they haven't done anything to address that. The sports front is still a mess - surely there's a better way to deal with the team logos in that left column? And their text face is still a bit too heavy for their presses.

And the kerning on the nameplate still sucks, but now I'm really nit-picking.

Overall I think this redesign is fine, but it still feels like a missed opportunity to really improve this paper.

Posted by: Christian Schwartz at November 18, 2005 10:52 AM

Did the cake say, "Happy Resign Day"?

The redesign doesn't seem like too much of an improvement, just a slight reorganization/updating of fonts and names.

Posted by: Not from around here at November 18, 2005 10:59 AM

Oh... now I get the joke.

Posted by: Not from around here part 2 at November 18, 2005 1:51 PM

I realize this is oversimplifying a little, but does changing fonts constitute a redesign? Honestly, that's the only real difference that sticks out. Maybe they SHOULD have sought some counsel outside the paper.

Posted by: Jim K. at November 18, 2005 3:52 PM

Once again, we're looking @ FRONT PAGES ..... there could be major improvements to inside pages that we're not seeing. Front pages does a total redesign not just make .......

Posted by: Kenny at November 18, 2005 4:00 PM

The misspelled cake is hilarious.

Posted by: Rich at November 18, 2005 6:46 PM

Yeah, it doesn't seem like this is much more than cosmetics. Seems like a true redesign is more than updating type and color palettes -- that's just an update to the tools we use to put papers together. A true redesign should rethink and update features of the paper, even update philosophy. Or am I talking out of my nether regions here?

Posted by: Douglas E. at November 20, 2005 11:06 PM

Take a look at the Sports, and Local/State pages, and you will see that the layout grid has changed. Local/State has gone from five to six columns. The closer you look, the more you see, eg added skyboxes on front page, and the contents/weather box is redone, stronger, tighter -- all those little details add up.

Vertical and horizontal rules used to firm up the pages, replacing boxes.

Even for the type, much more than just changing fonts, they changed the type specs too: leading and size being the most significant. Fine tuning type specs for each new font (and newspapers do rely on a complex variety), and getting them all to harmonize, is a job of work.

Hey, they canned fake small caps!

it's true, as has been noted, that they could have done more. But overall, it's in a different league than before. They did it thoroughly, and they did it in house. Nice work, New Hampshire.

Posted by: Nick Shinn at November 25, 2005 1:36 PM

Do you think the bakery was trying to say something?

Posted by: Jonathan Blundell at November 29, 2005 10:34 AM

Love the cake. Hate the redesign.

The former look and feel was warm and inviting: the current look and feel is cold and bland. I miss the arty use of color and headline fonts that invited me to read the stories. (The new sans serif font sits atop each article as if it were a stop sign.)

To my eye (and reading experience), a big step in the wrong direction.

Posted by: Robin Stamm at December 9, 2005 3:29 AM

Post a comment