The Food section is an award-winner for The Star. No doubt the redesign will keep that tradition going for it. I, too, admit I am a bit underwhelmed by the redesign. I think that's partly because of the hype that preceded the redesign. I remember one site (maybe this one) saying a year or two ago that the redesign was something never before seen. Well I've seen all this stuff before. It's beautiful, but it's nothing, in my opinion, that will increase circulation or ad dollars.

The "Preview" section cover illustration is cool.
And I love orange ...

yeah I'm agree look beautiful, colorful, smart pics. Very attractive for new readers.

This redesign gets better and better. In regards to this being stuff "we've seen before," I'm going to tell you right now that this is incredibly ambitious for an American newspaper, especially the tab, which looks very polished and shares many traits with magazines. Too few newspapers in the Lower 48 have taken this sort of leap, and in many ways, the leaps are much larger than those made by Baltimore and Minneapolis just last year.

Let's put the hype monster to bed, because it disregards the fact that this is just amazing work.

I'm curious to see what they did with the news sections.

Ernie, it's IMPOSSIBLE to put the hype monster to bed in Kansas City. The Star's new press is housed in, literally, a glass house (don't throw stones, edit board) that completely dominates the downtown skyline. It's truly stunning. Hundreds of news trucks are lined up underneath it, and at night, the whole city can literally see the presses churning away, the promise of tantalizing journalistic goodness awaiting all who behold it.

Lately, The Star has lost a lot of street cred due to their backing of some controversial transit and stadium issues that failed pretty spectacularly (at least by other city's standards). Still, they dominate this town's media and they have no competition whatsoever. I think that it was natural to expect more from them in this case. What that may be, I admit, I don't really know. So far, I'm thinking this may not be it. But that opinion may change as I get used to it.

Again, I'll agree that the color job is stunning and the photos looked fantastic. And whereas I didn't think it worked well in the "news" product, I think the redesign suceeds in the Preview section. This is a vast improvement for that section in my

...opinion.

:)

MAN, i wish our colors came out that bright and sharp. it looks stellar. :)

I've been noting the "comeback" of color in a lot of redesigns (mostly Mario Garcia joints).

But a common thread in many of these: Ambitious color use usually is paired with new presses that can produce good color (and hopefully a decent stock of paper).

As the new Color Resurgence takes hold, we're going to have to remember that not everyone's presses or newsprint stock is going to be conducive to this.

Readability of color tints on newsprint ... it's a tight rope to walk. It's great to look more like a magazine -- if you print on glossy magazine stock.

"Let's be careful out there ..."

I thought I was imagining it, but I guess I wasnt... the paper stock did seem to be of a higher grade.

Understood, and good point!
I think a healthy amount of skepticism/fear is built into most newspaper's as to whether or not they can pull off such a use of color negating its questionable use in most cases. Would you agree or not Dean?

should stop being so precise, we are speaking of design, all we know the defects about the newsprint, to stop attacking when a work is really good, Kelly is very good disigner and has done fantastics works, if some of us can do it better, do it, but at less we recognize this good job.

designer!!!

"The Star's new press is housed in, literally, a glass house that completely dominates the downtown skyline"

Well, hooray! I'm sure the Star's readers are *thrilled* about the appearance of the new printing plant. It will be a lot more pleasant reading the paper knowing it came out of a cool building.

Let's see: bright, cartoonish colors... info blurbs in boxes all over the place... liberal use of Gotham -- must be another Mario Garcia project. Yawn!! From what I've seen of the Star's old pages, the new look is a lot more eye-catching, but I see nothing innovative about it. Frankly, I think it's gaudy and busy with not enough white space. I don't like the use of such flamingly bright colors -- it overpowers the photography, which is rightly the visual centerpiece of the page.

It also seems to me that there is not enough visual consistency from page to page. This looks like a redesign without a visual identity.

I've never been overly impressed with anyone who can't own up to their statements by attaching their name to them.

I agree with Christopher, I don't like this people always hidden and always with negative opinions, does not have neither moral neither professional value, sadly this is an open forum, but this type of opinions without base do not count.

I'd love to see the W*rdchicken say all this to Mario Garcia's face and then offer a viable alternative.

Alas, such a thing is solely the product of fantasy.

The comments used by "not overly impressed" were taken out of context, by the way. I made them as a statement of fact, in response to Ernie's comment about the "hype monster." I personally applaud The Star for staying downtown and contributing to the skyline as they have. All too often today you hear about the demise of the great American newspaper. Here they are saying that they are great, and now they have the building to match.

But I do think it's hard to seperate the hype from the design for several reasons. First, when you build a plant like that, and when you buy billboards all over the city saying "LOOK AT ME," you can expect that people are going to do just that. People aren't tripping all over themselves.

The Star is also doing a promotion for their first newspaper off the press. They will bundle the last newspaper off their old press with the new one off the new press and they're taking orders in advance. I don't know if there's a precedent for this (anyone out there who knows about this sort of thing, please share). But they're manufacturing an event out of the fact that they have a new printing press and are, in fact, printing newspapers off it. Well, hooray, you know? The Star spent $200 million and they're what, catching up to the color quality of Parade circa 1970? Still, I imagine it will provide a nice circulation bump, if only due to the amount of advertising they're doing.

People in this town are rooting for The Star. Hemingway used to write for them. They're responsible for the boulevard system, the fountains and one of the city's great museums. They're the ones who cleaned up this town during the "wide open" days, helping to make it the extremely boring place it is today. Readers want a great newspaper. Without having competition, they suffer from lack of comparison. I suppose when you compare it to The Olathe Daily News or the Independence Examiner -- both regional dailies with about 1/10th of their circulation -- you can really see their design supremacy.

If I had a constructive comment to make out of this, I would say that I'm not blasting the fine professionals at Garcia. I'm sure they're following their client's wishes to the T. I just wish their client had wanted something a little less busy and a lot more "classic" in feel.

You right the client wants something and simply one must do it, but does not have nothing to do with the power and the money of the publishers, I have seen very good re-designs with very little budget, this forum is to speak of design not of the money that spend, if Garcia-Media received 6 million dollars I congratulate them they deserve themselves it for their 25 years in the industry, Fabulous marketing to be able to obtain so many clients in one year, happines, is a very good design company, because we talking about design or not?.
By the way Garcia-Media win The Best Newspaper Design of the World : The Obersver you know that?

The Observer...

The new StarTV section is really nice. The grids are MUCH easier to read now that they have color instead of dull grey backgrounds.

Also, get this:

The section is actually STAPLED together!!!

I understand where you're coming from, J. Tony Fernandez-Davila. And yes, I saw that The Observer won the contest and honestly, I'm a fan of Garcia and I mean no disrespect to their designers. They're a bunch of design sickos. Mad props.

But my comments are my unfiltered, initial reactions to the newspaper and I'm posting them here to enhance the discussion and I'm doing my best to praise The Star where applicable. And I know this forum has had the debate before -- design vs. editorial vs. money vs. journalistic guidelines etc. et al ad nauseum. But I don't think you can put design in a vacuum and say one size fits all. KC is a meat and potatoes town and I'm not sure if this is the design that's going to make people go "wow." (The photos did make me go "wow," however...it's like high-def.)

Also, I'm guessing that these first passes are an attempt to gauge reaction and I'm sure they're conducting focus groups on the new section. That, or the brass figures that the town is going to need some time to adjust to the smaller size of the paper and its sections, so they're doling them out bit by bit. I live this stuff, so I've spoken to a lot of people -- say about 50 or more in the past few days. The top comment was on the new size. They don't like it, but they aren't rebelling against it, either. I personally felt that their Neighborhood News sections looked like supermarket circulars, were cluttered and too hard to read.

Again, what are people going to do? It's the only newspaper in town, I doubt the design will stop serious readers from picking it up, but it may affect the overall readability experience for a while. This argument has been going on since the availability of color on the press. Black type on white ink is the easiest to read ("Ogilvy on Advertising" made a great case for that way back when). Looking over the samples you see here and it's black and white type on honey yellow and melon yellow. It's going to take time to get used to.

Why on Earth wouldn't the Star make this upgrade/redesign a big deal, an event? Of course they're going to. They need to sell papers, they spent lots of money, they're injecting some excitement into a "boring" city. Beside, it's fun creating a spectacle.

It's funny. When people comment about Garcia, or similar style of redesign, people say "unimpressed," "too much color," "nothing new" "sucks!" and then, in the same breath, call for a more "classical" approach. ???

Weighing in on this with a more inside perspective:

The comments so far have been very positive at the Star from the readers. There are a few who believe that all color is bad and that you should just print black and white. And those people have complained forever anyway. The second most commented on area of the Star: Type size. But in the Crytpoquip.

It is too early to tell if there is going to be a circulation surge, but that knowledge will come once the whole redesign launches (on June 5). For now, this is an experiment to see what the new press can do (to train the pressmen on the new presses) and shift the way we produce our features sections.

It was also a test of our system, CCI. This past week taught us what we can do in CCI and what we cannot do in CCI.

The biggest thing we found out was our type size needed adjusted. We debated for a long time what to make our body copy on the new 48-inch web. So, we did that.

I appreciate all the comments, especially the negative ones, as we are all listening and reading and adjusting to our readers. As most of you know, the redesign is an organic and living organism. But the Star had to change. For money reasons, advertising reasons and aesthetic reasons. I just can't wait to show you all the whole product.

Dear 'MV' of where I come, from CA and now in Madison, and very soon in New York, only I interest for design not for material things (that already I obtained it), now only we have to speak and we comment of design, what is the best way to improve our works for our readers, to give them better quality to our styles, we have to worry of our readers not of the publisher money, We have to worry of the colors because day by day we compete with the style of the Internet (The Guardian Unlimited.com) The Guardian have fantastic colors and brilliant colors, why KC Star cannot have this colors, oranges, red and green colors and I'm sure that the readers recognize this new style, to stop being so negative, especially Mr 'MV'. We appreciate the good designs without envies neither hard emotions, and again congratulations to Mr Gooch for be patient and professional.

Oh fer crissakes, chill out. It's not being negative, it's passionate. That's a good thing, I'd argue. I don't like it, I'm one reader. I think that the busier the page, the more it detracts from the astonishingly great color reproduction of the photographs. And I've applauded The Star for making it into an event, the context of my above comments was in regards to the hype.

I do know from speaking to several employees at The Star that the team over there is very excited with the design and happy about it.

The copies I have seen, Gooch, have tended to be out of register. I assume they are just getting their bearings straight down at the press.

'chill out','It's not being negative, it's passionate' ummmm! good expressions!

It's hard to make a judgement without seeing these pages as they were intended - on newsprint. What I see on my computer screen looks good, but how does it translate to the printed page?

People react strongly one way or another to this design because it's out of the norm. But after a while, you get used to it and it becomes normal and no one will think twice.

Did the ad department not get the memo about the redesign? Those are some horrid ads on the food pages!

I look forward to seeing how the rest of the newspaper looks.
I

The ads on the food pages ARE pretty distracting.

you right Dave the ads in the Food section look horrible.