The free daily amNew York launched a redesign today. It's a collaboration between between Chris Sabatini, amNY's design director, and Steve Cavendish, art director/graphics editor at the Chicago Tribune. Steve writes:

For those not familiar, amNY is a joint venture partially owned by Tribune. They produce a free, daily newspaper (M-F) and a website, amny.com, with help from Newsday (they print on Newsday's presses and the site is supported on the back end by Newsday.com). It's been a big success so far. The daily draw is a little more than 300K, 2/3 of which are distributed in Manhattan. It's got a strong local focus and they do a good job of aggressively covering the city, particularly transit issues.

The redesign attempts to do a few of things:

1) Clean up the type a bit. We switched from several cuts of Swiss and Myriad to Benton Sans (with Stainless used in some architecture).

2) Move people to the site. There's something on every page, whether it's a standing element, a folio or a refer to a specific web package, to drive folks to the web.

3) Control the use of color. On most days, they've got color capability for 75% of their pages. We built in color on the pages and developed a limited palate that will give readers a lot of color, but not haphazardly.

And while they have a little help from Newsday on the production and managerial end, it really is a shoestring of a staff putting out the paper every day. There's Chris plus two other designers, but, really, everybody does pages. One of the things that impressed me the most is that most of these folks have little or no design training, but they've picked things up and done a great job.

Stay tuned this week for more details on redesigns from North Carolina to Belgium.