Today's Front Pages, originally uploaded by veen.

Jeff Veen finds a Berkeley cafe that appears to be putting the Newseum's daily exhibit to use.

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La Tribune, a Paris financial daily, launched a Garcia Media-led redesign Monday (new pages on the right). Garcia Media’s Mario Garcia and Christian Fortanet worked with Francois-Xavier Pietri, La Tribune editor in chief, and Henry Houssay, art director.

Here’s Garcia’s rundown:

1. A front page that is designed to offer a quick glance at the main headlines of the day.

2. A page 2-3 “mini newspaper within the newspaper” that offers a five-minute glance at the content of that day’s newspaper. “This will be a highlight of this project for many readers,” Garcia said. “It is 100% utility and service for that busy reader who wants to get a good heads up on the news of the day before attending his/her first meeting.”

3. Better hierarchy throughout the entire newspaper, with bigger and bolder headlines.

4. More secondary readings to amplify information, or to send readers to other sources and related topics.

5. Greater fusion between the print and online edition (which was also designed with the help of Garcia Media’s team of Mario Garcia Jr and John Miller).

6. A color palette that identifies various sections of the newspaper, starting with the navigator.

7. Newly designed and rethought informational graphics style.

8. Redesign of all supplements.

9. New typographic fonts: Gotham Bold for new logo; Miller for headlines, with Guggenheim in various weights used for contrast throughout the entire newspaper.

10. New presentation of advertising, including advertising configurations never used before.

“The new La Tribune will be a more analytical, but still newsy, financial newspaper of record, but also more personalized,” Pietri said. “We will tell more stories from the personal viewpoint of those making news.”

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The Times of London today rolls out a new typeface, Times Modern, and a few other design changes, including a redrawn insignia in the nameplate.

The art director on the project was Neville Brody, who says the changes are more evolution than revolution.

“The Times had almost all of the tools it needed to create a dynamic, usable, clearly-articulated and familiar language from within its current vocabulary. What it lacked was a few catalytic elements and an evolved architecture (both page and section). Following its move from broadsheet size, the paper still carried some of the design language of the larger format. Essentially, the approach we adopted has been more architectural than decorative and more fundamental than surface. Visual elements and devices needed to be re-visited from the ground up and rationalised within a clear plan and layout.”

Of the new typography, David Driver, head of design for The Times, writes:

The Times Modern introduced today allows a better shaped headline with extra characters per line. This allows for more articulation in the process of writing. The change is not reckless impulse, but reading conditions for many people have become less leisurely. Newspaper typography should evolve to meet technological innovations and The Times is once again at the sharp end.

The body copy remains Times Classic. They’ve also introduced Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Gotham to the lineup.

On the editorial page, Times editors say: The relationship between The Times and its readers is curiously personal for a mass-market publication. In the past a thousand pens might have leapt from their inkwells to protest about a facelift to a familiar friend. But few of our readers today read us at leisure in leather armchairs. We, too, must move with the times, from the age of stiff collars into an age of relaxed formality.

They’re also soliticing questions for a Brody Q&A.

And don’t miss this very cool slideshow of 221 years of Times nameplates.

My favorite quote from the internal guide to the redesign: “The redesign centres on a new headline font, “Times Modern”. This font should NOT be squeezed! It has been drawn to be more condensed — and Big Brother is watching.”

Some more page comparisons, new pages on the right:

Update: Alan Formby-Jackson interviews Prowse.

>The Times They are a Changing - Thanks to Neville Brody's Research Studios [PRNewswire]
>After 221 years, the world’s leading newspaper shows off a fresh face [The Times]
>Times Modern: Changing our typeface in order to make life easier for the reader [The Times]

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The Belgian newspaper De Morgen, which redesigned in April, has been named Europe’s Best Designed National Newspaper in the eighth European Newspaper Award. Other winners of Europe’s Best Designed Newspaper awards:

• Bergens Tidende, Norway, Regional Paper
• Hufvudstadbsladet, Finland, Local Paper Plus
• Expresso, Portugal, Weekly
• Superdeporte, Spain, Judges’ Special Recognition

Ninety-one newspapers received Awards of Excellence in the competition.

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First in Israel and now in Romania, they loves them some Guardian!

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Ally Palmer of Palmer Watson sends word of a couple European projects they’ve recently finished. Denmark’s Politiken on Oct. 1 and Norway’s Adresseavisen on Sept. 16. Both were pretty radical changes. Politiken has “reinvented” itself, moving away from conventional news reporting. And Adresseavisen converted from broadsheet to compact. Here are some pages and Ally’s words about each. There’s more info at palmerwatson.com

Politiken

One of the most influential newspapers in Europe, has taken a brave step into the future.

Denmark’s respected daily broadsheet recently introduced a Palmer Watson redesign - but also reinvented the way it handles and presents news. It has abandoned its traditional news reporting format and replaced it with a two-tier system which is intended to combine the qualities of an online newsfeed and a news magazine.

The aim is to give readers the best of both worlds. The “overview” area of the pages provides a functional, comprehensive news service, produced and presented in a compact, efficient way to keep it as up to date as deadlines allow.

The “insight” area is where selected issues are given the “Politiken treatment” – quality writing, rigorous reporting, serious analysis - illuminated by some of the best photo-journalism you will see in any newspaper.

Alongside this significant change of approach in response to the challenge of new media and the explosion of free papers in Denmark, the paper updated its look - but this was a rethink, not a redesign.

Adresseavisen

Norway’s oldest newspaper, has made a hugely successful transition to tabloid.

The compact revolution swept into Norway earlier this autumn. Adresseavisen, based in Trondheim, was one of four regional broadsheets to convert to tabloid on the same day: the others were Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad and Faedrelandsvennen in Kristiansand.

Adresseavisen, 239-years-old, is one of Norway’s strongest brands. It dominates its region, reaching a huge percentage of the population. But already impressive readership statistics read even better after the switch from broadsheet to tabloid:  subscriptions are up by  5,300 taking circulation to 84,400. And the advertising volume is down 20% but the revenues are up 10%.

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Alan Jacobson has a response to my redesigns and circulation post, noting that circulation isn’t the only metric that should be considered when discussing the success of a redesign, that increased revenue would indicated success. He notes that the Bakersfield and Waterbury redesigns (for which he consulted) have showed increased classified revenues since their redesigns.

He is, of course, correct. (And he makes some other fine points about promotion, follow-through and content.) It wasn’t my intention to label these redesigns as failures. I just thought it’d be interesting to chart recent redesigns against the one easily obtainable and widely watched newspaper metric. I’m sure someone with the time and access to more sophisticated data could come to some more valuable conclusions. (Seems there are plenty of organizations and think tanks out there that could pull something like that off. Me, I’m just some guy blogging in his spare time.)

Still, I don’t think you can entirely separate revenue from circulation. If circulation continues to fall, print revenue will surely follow. The revenue will follow the eyeballs. The key, of course, is to make sure the eyeballs go to one of our other delivery platforms.

Update: Mary Nesbit, managing director of the Readership Institute at Northwestern University, says:

We need to be careful about what these charts are really telling us, because they don't take into account contextual factors. For instance:

1. Circulation "policy" in effect -- like decisions to cut way back on or stop discounting; decisions to cut out other low-paid categories; decisions to restrict circulation in certain areas etc.

2. The strategy or intent of the newspaper in mounting a redesign. The strategy, for instance, may be to maintain or grow readership (which is different from circulation.) Or it may be to grow readership in a particular segment. Or it may be to bring a more contemporary feel to a dated product. Or -- to sell more ads.

3. The nature of the redesign itself. Was it cosmetic redesign, or far-reaching changes to content, or some of both?

4. Internal factors. How much marketing was going on at the same time? What intensity of customer focus was at play in the circulation department? In advertising? Was the whole organization aligned against a circulation strategy?

Lacking this kind of data, interpretation is almost impossible. We come away from the charts with two things that may or may not be related: paid circulation continues on a downward trend at these properties (and in the industry generally, though readership of the print product and usage of the website are a much prettier picture); and these newspapers undertook redesigns. That's all really we can say.

Again, I'm not pushing any particular interpretation of these numbers. Mary certainly raises a lot of good questions. Someone should crunch the data and answer them. Hey! Maybe some institute on, say, readership!

>Lies, damn lies and statistics [Brass Tacks Design]

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I thought it would be interesting to chart the circulation numbers for some of the higher-profile redesigns of the past couple years: Bakersfield Californian, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, Houston Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Seattle Times, Spokane Spokesman-Review, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Waterbury, Conn., Republican-American. I also found some numbers for some British papers that have changed formats.

The numbers are from the ABC, mostly Monday-Saturday averages. I tried to get the March and September numbers for each year where I could, but it wasn't always possible. The British numbers are monthly, so they're a bit more volatile than the American six-month averages.

Circulation, of course, is affected by all sorts of factors from news to price changes to population fluctuations (you can see the snowbird spikes in the Orlando numbers every spring), so there really aren’t any firm conclusions you can draw about a redesign's effect from these numbers alone. Other than that it sure doesn't send it through the roof. (Unless you're a British paper that converts to Berliner. But even those numbers are coming back down.)

So for what they're worth, here they are (click on the graphs for a larger version):

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Those circulation numbers are out, and unsurprisingly, they’re not pretty. But they’re not the whole story, either. The number of unique visitors to online newspaper sites in the third quarter of 2006 was up 24 percent over last year.

It’s pretty clear where the eyeballs are migrating, and it’s not to the deadwood. So whether you think print will dominate for decades or will “fall off the cliff” within 10 years, the direction of that trendline is clear. So where does that leave us newspaper designers? It should leave us at the forefront of the conversation about what comes next, if we’re willing to step up.

Jay Small wrote an excellent and thought-provoking post last week that says he’s coming to the conclusion that American newspapers are spending too much of their resources on design.

He references the recent redesigns in St. Pete and Los Angeles and says:

In either case -- in fact, in any of the redesigns you can see on NewsDesigner.com from the past two years -- would you honestly expect a measurable return on investment? How much does the needle have to move to make the redesign worth the time and money you could have spent on other things?

No question, many of the recent redesigns are improvements. They may even have been necessary. But Jay may be getting more right by the day. I have to think that if you’re working on a major redesign and you’re planning anything less than blowing up the current model of the print newspaper, you’re wasting your time and the publisher’s money.

The conversation we need to start having is not so much about fonts and navigation and color palettes (not that those are bad conversations to have), but about what's next for the print newspaper. It’s the cliche of the moment, but it’s also true: We’re not newspapers anymore, we're news organizations. And we need to be planning for the day when the print edition is not the core product, but just one of several ways we engage people, get them information and facilitate their conversations. Because this is not off in some misty future; this could be reality before the tires on your car wear out.

So what does print become? A best-of compilation of the online edition? A customizable buffet of sections for each subscriber to pick from? An Economist-style compendium of in-depth reporting and analysis, leaving the breaking news for the Web?
Is it free? Is it tabloid? Is it hyperlocal? (Or all three?)

Heck if I know, but it’s time to talk about it.

Oh, and we should be part of the online design conversation, too. Lord knows most newspaper websites out there look pretty craptastic. We’ve stayed out of that fight for too long, and beyond all reason, the “ugly design works” camp is winning.

>Raise bar for newspaper design investments [Small Initiatives]

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