Politiken from Denmark looks really similar. Or am I wrong?

For me, it looks really similar to Politiken from Denmark. Or am I wrong?

Not entirely unsimilar to The Guardian, either, eh? Still, I like it.

From the smattering of pages here, it looks like they've retained a lot of the principles of the old Globe & Mail, too. Strong photography, highly disciplined grid, intelligent white space, directional and sparingly used color, albeit a bit brighter palatte. It looks inviting. I'll be eager to see it in a month or so, as people get very comfortable with their new tools.

While these pages look great in thumbnail, when you're holding the paper it looks incredibly disappointing.

The trim of the paper is good but the overuse of lines makes the entire thing look grey. Rather than looking modern, the paper looks rather retro--like something the Post would have put out had it been published in the early 80s. Or maybe the Globe's trying to mimic websites circa 1999.

The plethora of typefaces, lack of discernable headlines and over-reliance on lines--presumably to hide the basic design rules they're trying, unsucessfully, to break--make most of the paper look like a jumbled mess. The ragged type with the smaller column size makes reading stories difficult. Despite the smaller paper, the text looks more dense and cramped.

It's hard to read more than a few graphs in without being distracted or pulled away by a competing deck or psuedo-headline. Also, the breaks in the middle of the story that give statistics or sidebar information break the flow of the text.

And speaking of white space? What white space? With the exception of the pages shown here, there wasn't a cubic millimetre of whitespace to be found in the entire paper.

Did the quality of the paper or printing go down on this redesign? Because the photos look very muddy.

That being said, I think the redesign could be improved with tweaking. Use fewer decks. Nix the vertical lines and pump the headlines back up. Reduce the number of tyepfaces used and stop trying to cram so much on every single page.

Agree with the previous comment: in the flesh, it's a disappointment. The former design had a lot going for it ... they've thrown out a lot of good.

I would have to wholehartedly agree with Joan's assessment. There are some elements of the redesign that seemed to work, but most of the elements feel overblown.

Why is there a four-point horizontal line seperating all of the vertical elements? I found it incredibly distracting. And even the pages above, when looked at closely, are incredibly distracting.

The more I obsess over this redesign the more I see elements that are salvagable.

From reading Eddie's column and looking at the paper I can glean that it was trying to go for a website kind of feel. But it just seems like they had a very shallow idea of what a modern website feels like. My earlier comment, that they were going for a website circa 1999, stands. Early, immature websites had that uber-cluttered feel. But in modern incarnations, we've seen a shift toward a more subtle, spare and scaled back approach.

The best websites have long been taking design tips from newspapers and magazines, by reorganizing and prioritizing their information so that they could be more digestible.

Take the modern incarnation of www.amazon.com, for example and compare it with one of its ancestors; http://web.archive.org/web/19991013091817/http://amazon.com/

Notice, modern websites use less text, more photos and fewer links. In the later site, information is more hierarchical and better organized. Also note the use of 3D graphics, instead of flat 2D ones.

This incarnation of the Globe has taken a big step backwards, IMHO. It should have been simplifying its pages, playing up its photos and graphics, streamlining and packaging stories and continuing to make the paper more navigable--maybe even throw some spiffy 3D logos and breakers into the mix. The old Globe's use of whitespace was really commendable and I'm sorry to see that go. The new globe just feels really, really old.

Ironically, the Globe website redesign was, I think, quite well done. Everything on there now looks clean, uncluttered, modern and easy to navigate.

/ranting.
Must get back to work.

The more I obsess over this redesign the more I see elements that are salvagable.

From reading Eddie's column and looking at the paper I can glean that it was trying to go for a website kind of feel. But it just seems like they had a very shallow idea of what a modern website feels like. My earlier comment, that they were going for a website circa 1999, stands. Early, immature websites had that uber-cluttered feel. But in modern incarnations, we've seen a shift toward a more subtle, spare and scaled back approach.

The best websites have long been taking design tips from newspapers and magazines, by reorganizing and prioritizing their information so that they could be more digestible.

Take the modern incarnation of www.amazon.com, for example and compare it with one of its ancestors; http://web.archive.org/web/19991013091817/http://amazon.com/

Notice, modern websites use less text, more photos and fewer links. In the later site, information is more hierarchical and better organized. Also note the use of 3D graphics, instead of flat 2D ones.

This incarnation of the Globe has taken a big step backwards, IMHO. It should have been simplifying its pages, playing up its photos and graphics, streamlining and packaging stories and continuing to make the paper more navigable--maybe even throw some spiffy 3D logos and breakers into the mix. The old Globe's use of whitespace was really commendable and I'm sorry to see that go. The new globe just feels really, really old.

Ironically, the Globe website redesign was, I think, quite well done. Everything on there now looks clean, uncluttered, modern and easy to navigate.

/ranting.
Must get back to work.

Sorry about the double post.

Whitespace is definitely an endangered species, and the Globe – one of the last bastions of it in the newspaper world – is not helping its cause with this redo. I suppose it's a side-effect of the smaller overall page size, but it's quite packed ... did the leading get tighter AND the body copy font get bigger? That's dangerous.

No offence to Mr. Shinn, who obviously took the assignment with gusto, but I'm not sure what the folks at the G&M were so afraid of to warrant this unnecessary redesign. I am afraid now, to see my precious Saturday issue when it comes.

Neither the leding nor the type size have changed. If you take a copy of the old edition and line it up with the new you can tell.

The cramped appearance is an illusion caused by the ragged right justification.

This page: http://www.newsdesigner.com/blog/images/april07/tgam7.php (The Pentagon/art schools one) immediately made me think of the Guardian. You can only see the thumbnails and that's quite a different experience from the full paper, but the vertical rules and the pull quotes look exactly like the UK paper.

Or maybe that's just me.

Joyce, it's gone from 9 on 10 (Utopia) to 9 on 9.5.
We didn't want to lose character count on the smaller page size, and reducing the leading did the trick. I don't think tight leading is an issue, unless you're consciously looking for vertical "islands" rather than reading the text. Certainly, the typeface was designed for this exact spec. The type is a tad larger than the Guardian's, as that paper's readers have better eyesight :-)

If you're commenting from getting your fingers grubby on the first issue, let me address the weight of the text type: I was disappointed it's a bit heavily inked (at least mine was), but going live to a new format does need some refinement. And some getting used to, more so by designers than readers, I would hazard.

What excited me most was the concept we developed of different flavours of the sans face, "busy" (GM News) for straight news heads where the type is often required to carry some interest, and "laid back" (GM Sans) for features, where the page designers have more "design space", white or otherwise, and a more reticent face works better.

Throughout, the type contrast is thus mainly between sans and sans, rather than sans and serif, enabling an overall "sans-y" quality, definitely a stylistic branding, as is the "webby" look, although that may be more symptomatic of the integration of print and web news, rather than mere styling.

I'm surprised at how radical a design this is for a supposedly conservative old lady like the Globe and Mail, I mean, all sans headings and all text rag right?

Unfortunately Nick, the typeface choices, and the weights used by the design team, have the effect of making the Globe look like one giant advertorial section. The main headline "From Canadian custody into cruel hands" should be half as long and twice the point size, and there seems to be far too little whitespace above the headline and far too much below it, making the head look unattached to the story it's supposed to, well, be attached to.

I too was pretty surprised at what a "modern" look hte Globe has adopted - and maybe it's just me, but I miss the old one already. Perhaps it's that I've read the Guardian a few times too often, but the new Globe screams "we've thrown away our traditional centrist balanced high quality reportage - try some bigger photos and snazzy fonts instead?". Also, the paper really does seem rather tight - it just looks too busy if you ask me [which no one did ;) ] .

I like the new look, very nice. Also, it was about time they cut the size of the paper. The whole world has already gone smaller, but the Globe and Mail held out as the last "dinosaur" among the broadsheets.

one giant advertorial section

Yeah, the onus is now on the advertisers to switch to serif types.

The main headline "From Canadian custody into cruel hands" should be half as long and twice the point size

True Steve, and there were pages like that in some of the prototypes, so I was a little disappointed that the lead of the first edition was quite low key. I suspect the spacing under the heads might be a glitch.

I was in the UK, subscribing to the Guardian when their famous redesign launched, and hated it at first, but soon came to appreciate it. Also, if you hang onto copies of the old design for a few weeks, they lose their bloom, which makes the transition less painful.

Werner, there are still some huge broadsheets in South Africa and Australia.

This, to me, looks like a failed guardian copy attempt. It's like they took all the bad parts of the guardian and magnified them.
The thing with the Guardian's recent redesign is that it made pages much simpler when it took away white space, the Globe appears to have kept the complexity of traditional news design and then added the complex design elements on top of it.

It's not horrible, and from far away, it does look clean and artsy, but It's hard to say that it's much of an improvement.

I decided not to spew out my first reaction. At first, I was surprised by the change and spent most of my train ride absorbing the new design. But once I started to get over the newness and read what has been my daily paper for over 10 years, I enjoyed it. For one thing, it was easier to handle thanks to the new size.

Type
I am not having any difficulty reading the new body type. Personally I am not a fan of flush-left, ragged right type, but given the narrow columns and the pressence of the gutter rule, it seemed easy to read. True, for the first hour I was too focused on how the type looked. That's the problem with us designers; we over react to the design and type, rather than absorb the content. Three typefaces; how is that a plethora?

Rules
I had trouble looking for the four-point rules referred to earlier. The thick black runs are really striking. When I look at a page, the rules pop out, and it helps me navigate through the page. The bit of text below the thick rules were categorizing and offering a subhead before I hit the headline, which helped me quickly understand what I'm reading. I didn't find them distracting; instead they created order. The only other paper that seems to understand this is the Guardian. Yes, one could say there are similarities, but that seems like half the story. Maybe the Guardian and the Globe understand something about the reader that other's don't. It's hard to offer perspective without organizing the information.

Headlines
There seem to be complaints that the headlines are too small. I would argue that headlines in other papers are too large. I don't need to be screamed at. BIGGER IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER. Take for example the National Post's cover after the Virginia Tech shooting. It felt like it was screaming loud enough to be heard in Virginia. What will happen if for example we have a tragedy of a great magnitude here in Canada. The Post will now have to go bigger just to wake up the reader.

Overall
I'm really not seeing the "webby" look. I especially don't seem this design mimicking a website for the 90s. When the Post first came out (and still now), it reminds me of a classic, 50s newspaper. It's too elegant for a newspaper thrown away at the end of the day. While it's look has been a through back, the new Globe design is going forward. Less serif type, smaller format, intelligent thinking in structuring the content. It's refreshing and I'm certainly happy based on the first two days worth. That's certainly more than I can say for Maclean's, which I've never been able to pick up since it's last redesign. That was an example of a publication following one trend (it reminded me of Newsweek, in the 90s) versus the trend the Globe is setting (more European, but uniquely Canadian).

"Uniquely Canadian"? I would say rather that it is quintessentially Torontonian-- wannabe & watered down--a bad immitation of what European papers have been doing now for several years, though without any of the refinement, innovation or grace.
The forward-looking concept for the evolution of the paper as a whole is laudable, though the design seems to look backwards more so than forwards. It is now *less* visual on the front page and the rather drab colour palette is reminiscent of a time when major dailies were still printed in black & white + spot red. This newspaper has gotta get some gravitas.

Torontonian-- wannabe & watered down

Speaking as a Torontonian, allow me to contradict that stereotype: fuck you too.

Give the paper a couple weeks to adjust to it's new design guidelines...then pick it apart. Right now, it's a sitting duck. As the G&M's editors get the hang of things, I'm sure the product will end up looking a lot tighter and more professional.

Anyone else think this "new" font looks like the one Metro Boston (and New York) has been using for display type?

Rick, my sans fonts for the G&M do indeed have something in common with Lucas De Groot's Corpid, apart from both having been designed fairly recently for newspapers, which tends to normalize proportions. It's the "ductus", or remnant of the angled calligraphic stroke which originally structured type, now used as a design principle. It results in slightly asymmetric forms to the bowl in letters like "d", and in the "stemless" top of "g".

This ductus-driven genre of type has been identified as quite Dutch, attributed to the influence of the theories and teaching of Gerrit Noordzij, author of "The Stroke", upon a generation of type designers such as De Groot, Majoor, Smeijers, Erik Van Blokland et al.

But you can find this calligraphic theme in much older types, such as the anti-geometric sans faces of the 1930s like Metro and Bernhard Gothic. The first face I produced in what is often termed the humanist genre was Shinn Sans in 1985, and that, rather than Corpid, is the most obvious precedent for my "new" font.

The typefaces aren't very nice. It seems that the Globe & Mail's decision to commission Mr Shinn was completely geographic. I can't name a single notable Canadian type designer, apart from the late Les Usherwood. If the paper had contacted one of the Dutch or Belgian designers mentioned above - for example - they would have been in better hands.

This is my first time at Newsdesigner.com. There seem to be a lot of cheap shots based on geographic prejudice. Is that par for the course, or just pranksters trying to crank my handle?

The redesign's weakness isn't Shinn's font. It's the use of his fonts that doesn't really do them, or the design concept, justice.

Mr Shinn, I was not being prejudiced. I was just pointing out that in the type design world, Canada is a relatively weak contributor, especially in comparison with a country like Holland, which has half the population of Canada, but which can boast approximately a dozen world-class type designers versus Canada's none. Since this is the case, it would have made sense for the Globe & Mail to look outside of Canada's borders.

About the fonts:
Nick Shinn is a fine typographer. His new font is interesting, I especially like the lighter weights, but I find it to be an inappropriate stylistic choice for the Globe and Mail.
About the design:
I was expecting this redesign to "wow" me. As a Canadian I am embarrassed that our national paper is merely following european design trends rather than taking the leadership in news design. Alas, this is a missed opportunity.

Abraham, I have to disagree. I feel the opposite - the layouts are quite nice, but the type doesn't work for me, regardless of its country of origin. Mr. Shinn's 'News' sans looks too decorative, or 'loud', to do its job day after day. Too many of its characters cry out for attention. It is almost as though the headline face wants to be looked at, rather than read. I'm not very familiar with Mr. Shinn's work, but this face looks like it comes from a typographer who does not have much experience working with newspapers. The text face seems decent, but is also very busy in its details. I would be curious to see how it works in print, and I have not seen a Canadian paper for sale here in Europe before. One can't honestly judge text type from a PDF. The second sans does nothing for me, and looks very much like Bliss, which I am also ambivalent towards. The logic of the more plain typeface being designed for more decorative layouts is lost on me. This seems entirely counterintuitive. It is all a matter of personal opinion, of course. I cannot fault Mr. Shinn for wanting to put his mark on the paper, however much I may disagree with the idea that a newspaper is a place for one's own personal expression.

Aside from the type, the layouts seem clean, inviting, and well-organized. Almost Scandinavian! The heavy rules do a good job of breaking the pages up into discrete entry points. The photography is very strong. I see very little use of information graphics, however, which is disappointing. One hopes that they are used well and often in the paper, although I have doubts about any of these new types serving well in them.

Mr Smith, parading your ignorance of the Canadian type design scene certainly counts as prejudice, IMO.

Without overly indulging in breast beating, I could provide a long list of leading newspapers around the world that presently use my faces. In the US, for instance, the Chicago Tribune and the recent redesign of the St Petersburg Times.

However, I don't feel it's always necessary to "hire the best in the world" for a newspaper design -- there's much to be said for using in-house talent, and local type designers.

Ms Cedar, I'd ask you to reconsider your opinion that the Globe and Mail redesign is derivative of design trends, and entertain the idea that it just might contribute to such trends, and may well advance them.

This redesign features the integration of:

All sans headlines
All rag right copy
Rules prominent, and between every column
Two flavours of sans serif type

It's too early to say whether this is leadership--after all, no one may follow this direction--but surely it is an original approach, and should not be dismissed, just because it breaks new ground, of following European trends.

Anders, the humanist qualities of the News sans are an interesting bone of contention. During the design process, in which layout and types developed together, the liveliness of the News face emerged as a necessary contrast to the more geometric sans, the strict gridularity and rule-iness of the layout, and no doubt the dry tone of the Globe's headline copy. So while in isolation the "decorative" quality may seem distracting, it is my belief the little bit of warmth it provides will be a pleasant part of the everday reading experience of the paper as a whole.

Mr. Shinn, with all due respect, I hardly think that two typefaces which don't quite fit the layout are a substitute for one really functional family. Perhaps it would have been better to concentrate on making one really good sans serif that could work across all sections, with some warmth but not so much self-consciousness. To make something look Humanist does not really mean that it has to be decorative. The inherent structure can be quite warm and inviting without silly details. Perhaps look at Swedish furniture for an example. I also disagree with your description of either of the sans serifs as being 'geometric'. I know my English is imperfect, but I think you mean only that it is simpler. I also think with some irony that it is more successfully Humanist!

I must also disagree with your assessment of left-aligned copy being a breakthrough. I can think of several newspapers that set comment and opinion in left-aligned copy to ensure that it is not confused with hard fact. Left-alignment has also been common in magazines for decades, and indeed the current trend for newspapers in the last 4 to 5 years is one of looking more like magazines, but now we are splitting hairs! Best wishes and thank you for responding.

Aside from Nick Shinn's beautiful new typefaces for the Globe, he also designed the previous design's faces and several other custom typefaces that are quite good.

Of course, Nick is not the only Canadian Type designer.
Rod Macdonald
Keith Tam
Carl Dair (author and type designer, see Cartier)
Jim Rimmer
Mark Herd
(to name a just a few)

As for Canada being weak typographically, I could name several industries where Canada is seen internationally as weak (hockey aside), but this is not because Canadians are weak, rather we tend toward humble behaviour over displays of grandstanding. For example, Canada gave the world the incandescent light bulb (Edison bought the patent from two Canadians), the telephone, insulin. But with those three cases, the inventors are hardly known outside our borders (or mistakenly thought not to be Canadian).

Few non-designers are even aware of who designed most typefaces and really, type design is very much an exercise in creating something that should not be noticed. Type needs to be functional (readable, legible) and the design invisible beyond the actual letterform, except for designers who can drool over the subtle curves, feet, arms & lege, eyes, ears and counters.

Dear Nick Shinn,

I must correct your statement that "Two flavours of sans serif type" is a new concept. It is not. Please stop saying so. Eric Spiekerman's award winning DB SANS had two distinct styles for text and headlines. There were many others before this.

One more point: CORPID was not recently designed as you assert. It was designed over a decade ago for the Ministry of Landbouw, Natuurbeheer en Visserij in the Netherlands. At the time it was known as AGRO SANS. I do not think that our colleague Luc would appreciate you denigrating his work.

Will you be at Typotechnica? We should get a beer my friend!

Sincerely,
Randolph T. Burke

Mr. Terrean, thank you for clarifying about Canada's contributions to the world of type. I was familiar with Cartier, of course, but the other designers' work was not familiar to me. (From my google-ing of the various designers you noted, it is a good thing the Globe & Mail didn't contact Mark Herd!) My observation about the weakness of the Canadian contribution to the world of type design was like my observation that Nigeria isn't famous for its downhill skiing, or Hong Kong for its vast expanses of green space. Mr. Shinn, thank you for noting the other newspapers whose types you have designed; I will keep an eye open for them. (Starting with this site.)

Anders, your English comprehension and expression are first rate. I think we probably disagree on the limits of what is appropriate in "decorativeness" with regards to a humanist news face. I didn't conceive of the extra lower case serifs and the calligraphic quality of GM News as whimsical details, but as a systematic treatment, and the serifs, angled terminals, lean to the left at the top of lowercase stems, and slight overlap at some joints, are all part of that.

I'm aware that many papers use rag right body copy, often to distinguish news from comment, but to completely banish justified text is quite rare, and I would be interested to know of other papers that have done this.

Randolph,

Two flavours of sans serif type is not of course a complete innovation, and I don't believe I claimed it was. I would add Chalet and Lisboa to your mention of DB Type. However, what we've done with the GM faces is really pushed the concept, and done so in the context of a news design. Whether individual design elements are radical or unprecedented is not really the point, it's the particular combination of elements -- and there are many more than the four I mentioned -- which constitute a design and make it unique.

I do not think our colleague Luc would appreciate you suggesting I denigrated his work. Please note that I said "fairly recently designed" in describing Corpid, as the idea I was trying to convey to Rick L was that I didn't copy Corpid, but that ductus-informed sans faces had been around a while, going back to the not fairly recent 1930s.

Sorry, can't make Typotechnica, my budget this year only covers a TDC seminar in NY and TypeCon in Seattle. But getting together over a beer is definitely something to look forward to!

Re. Canadian type designers, mention must be made of John Hudson's contribution to international typography, very recently in Microsoft's ClearType faces -- along with Luc De Groot, as it happens.

Its a newspaper redesign... There are many more important things to worry about than how curly a font is or how thick a rule is - move on!

What's a font?

The entire paper set ragged gives me a headache. I'm looking forward to the Saturday edition.

Nick,

The Morning Call of Allentown, PA, has been set in ragged-right since at least the early '80s, perhaps longer. It was, back in the day, quite an influential newspaper in the developing field of American newspaper design.

Thanks for jumping in, by the way! It's been fascinating!

I've been a loyal Globe subscriber for years and am very disappointed in the un-design as I'm calling it. No disrespect to Nick (be careful when he offers to have discussions over beer with you!!) as I don't have issues with his fonts, but rather how they are being used. basically the only "sparkle" on each page now are those damned heavy rules and bars. The type (therefore the words) are now being treated as secondary elements which goes against everything I've loved about the Globe. The previous combinations of a serif text, sans subhead/caption and light serif headline font made for exquisite layering of information. I appreciate the desire to reduce the size of the paper (width) but I think that the better solution would have been to adopt the old design to the narrower width, with a bit of editing to account for the reduced word count, rather than cramming the same (or more) information on the smaller page size. We've now got a national paper that looks like the other national paper we have in Canada, not as bad, but certainly not in a different league the way the Globe used to be. It reminds me of how Canada's national news magazine Macleans was un-designed by a journalism student 2 years ago. It actually used heavy rules in a clean and interesting manner, with fonts designed by that "other" Canadian type guru Rod McDonald.

To read about Canadian typographers (there are more than Nick, Rod and Les Usherwood who died in 1983) check out the GDC Journal 6, avaiilable at www.gdc.net

Mark, my pleasure, as you may have noticed, I enjoy a good argument. At the risk of putting your foot in your mouth, which can happen easily online, you find out all kinds of things, like that gem about rag right and the Morning Call.

I didn't intend for the font comment to come off as a slight. I've only seen the inside pages twice before, and the ones you've posted look really slick.

After checking out your front page online for years, I was just a little shocked that one of the world's best-designed papers would want to change its look. However, I think the results are marvelous and has a very modern feel. Love what I see (not that I'm any authority or anything).

Thanks Rick, it's cool that you picked up the "Dutch" feel of the types by comparing them with Corpid/Agro.

Hold on a minute! I see from Mr. Shinn's web site that he is in fact an Englishman living in Canada. So these new typefaces aren't even truly Canadian! Perhaps the Globe & Mail should have looked up Rod McDonald, whose work seems to be the best Canada presently has to offer.

Great overall redesign! The newspaper-wide category system organizes the articles better than any other paper I've seen. The three fonts are all great; the two sans are both warm and minimalist at the same time; especially Globe and Mail News.
However, some aspects are a bit confusing. Why are all articles, both opinion and fact, in ROB and the Front Section titled and sub-titled with GM News, while all other titles and subtitles in the other section are GM Sans? This is an irritating discrepancy. All titles and quotes should use News; all graphics, extras and captions should use Sans across the entire newspaper.
As well, why do only some comment articles begin with the (beautiful) dark-and-light grey comment bar?
There are also some problems above the top margin with the page categorization, especially in ROB and the Front comment section. I noticed the comma was added today after the date at the top of each page...well done Globe.
My last qualm is that the two lines at the top and bottom of the writer's names are slightly uneven. It is even worse when there are mutliple writers over two lines.
Otherwise, the new Globe and Mail is beautiful. The new width is cleaner and easier to hold upright. The general look and feel is extreemely modern, proffessional, and surprisingly warm. The photography too is much better (I'm not asure why). The only things I strongly disagree with are the Sans/News titling issue and the removal of the ROB front-page summaries for why the stocks/commodities went up or down. Those aside, well done Nick and the rest of the redesign team. The finest newspaper design I think I've ever seen--just don't make Globe Life too sensational (its front page headline contained the word "slut" today).

Mr Smith, most Torontonians are immigrants. I'm a Canadian citizen and have lived here for 30 years. Is that enough CanCon for you?

Long-time Globe reader, first-time commenter. My general experience of the new design is that it's impenetrable. The type is set too tight, the heavy rules are overkill, the heads are too small and weak, the column measure is brutal. I struggle to read the thing every morning, but am maybe getting into half the stories I used to.
The page designers seem to be struggling with the new design as well, as the layout is very bland, the position of pullquotes highly questionable, and, yes, where are the graphics and strong photos? Someone needs to school them on the basics of type contrast in those awful sidebars, it's not like there aren't enough weights to choose from.
The type seems simultaneously to have no flavor and too much flavor. I cannot believe condensed type is nowhere in the new paper. That baseline grid needs opening up . . . I'll stop ranting. Bottom line: it's actually harder to read, and that's not a good thing.

Long-time Globe reader, first-time commenter. My general experience of the new design is that it's impenetrable. The type is set too tight, the heavy rules are overkill, the heads are too small and weak, the column measure is brutal. I struggle to read the thing every morning, but am maybe getting into half the stories I used to.
The page designers seem to be struggling with the new design as well, as the layout is very bland, the position of pullquotes highly questionable, and, yes, where are the graphics and strong photos? Someone needs to school them on the basics of type contrast in those awful sidebars, it's not like there aren't enough weights to choose from.
The type seems simultaneously to have no flavor and too much flavor. I cannot believe condensed type is nowhere in the new paper. That baseline grid needs opening up . . . I'll stop ranting. Bottom line: it's actually harder to read, and that's not a good thing.

Maybe they should cut back to 5 columns instead of 6? I agree; existing columns are a bit tight.

My husband is an avid reader of your paper and misses daily stock report; I do the Challenge Crossword and since the introduction of your new format it truly is a "challenge". I can't read the clues. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE consider increasing the size of the print.

Like The Guardian or maybe I'm wrong but more fresh than before redesigns.

Going to 5 columns presents special problems in layout and, more importantly, ad placement. The LEAST they could do is open up the leading on the body copy. It is brutally tight.

Can someone put poor Agnes in touch with the ACTUAL Globe and Mail?

Many comments above obsess over minutia and ignore the overarching themes of the redesign: class and quality.

The Toronto newspaper market is fiercely competitive. Ever more lurid design and ever larger screaming headlines have afflicted all the papers for years.

The Globe's redesign signals a flight to quality. It's a gutsy move, and I hope it pays off.

BTW, The Globe now clearly distinguishes between news and comment with straightforward labels. Incredibly, that sets it apart from other Canadian papers. Most papers here have drifted into the deplorable practice of muddling things up -- columnists and foreign correspondents sometimes write opinionated articles on page 1 and elsewhere in the news sections. The editors then say with straight faces that readers are supposed to know the difference because of a photo of the columnist is printed! How hard would it be to label things clearly, I have often wondered. And now the Globe does.

I agree with some of the criticism about ragged text and overly fussy elements. Much of this can be corrected in the days ahead.

And the Globe has avoided the disastrous error of the Wall Street Journal of making the page size reduction seem obvious.

All in all, the redesign is a success.

Found an interesting column on The Star web site. Any thoughts on the Saturday edition?

Pls see link:
http://www.thestar.com/article/207811

About the integration of print and web.
Part of this redesign concerns that, and the G&M has physically restructured its newsroom with that in mind.
However, while both web and print have been redesigned, they have separate branding.
So I'm wondering, who's leading the pack with cross-media branding? Anybody use Georgia online and Miller in print?

The design of the Toronto Globe and Mail has been played down in my opinion. Not down to the point of atrocity, but the traditional look of the old design was almost totally thrown out.

It's okay, but I like the old look much better, considering, of course, the cost of the revamp in time, money, and human involvement.

Ugh.

Interesting reading. I learned much going down this thread about why, or why not, I should like (or dislike) the 'new' G&M.

All I can say is that with a heavy heart, after 30 years of readership I canceled my subscription to the Globe today. I gave it time, but I can say that I most definitely do not like the new format.

You posts has helped me identify why, and I thank you all for it.

As a former employee, I, too, am saddened to say that the revamped Globe is unreadable. Therefore, I am going to stop the paper for the summer and hope that by the fall, there will be some changes to the design. It is now a designer's paper rather than a reporter's paper. How sad. I'll keep my fingers crossed for a more readable product in the fall!

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