The Chicago Tribune launched its long-awaited redesign today. A bunch more pages after the jump.

The SND site has a look into the project in slideshow and video form, and Poynter has a Q&A with Design Director Jonathon Berlin.

There’s Chicago reaction to the redesign from design consultant Ron Reason, and public radio station WBEZ talked with Northwestern’s Jeremy Gilbert and E&P’s Mark Fitzgerald. Chicago blogs Chicagoist and Gapers Block solicited comments from their readers.

And Visual Editors’ Robb Montgomery took his camera out on the streets of suburban Chicago to find out what readers think.

In other redesign news, Mario Garcia redesigned The Oklahoman and the Hartford Courant relaunched with a new design yesterday.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel launched its redesign today. Charles Apple’s got every detail you’ll ever want to know.

And over at SportsJournalists.com, everyone’s got an opinion.

The Orlando Sentinel debuted its redesign this morning. Charles Apple’s got images and thoughts.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in with a piece in Monday’s edition. (Tip: if you’re not a WSJ subscriber, go through Digg).

Past experience shows newspaper makeovers don’t necessarily translate into financial success. After the Bakersfield Californian underwent a drastic redesign two years ago, the 60,000-circulation paper in California’s Central Valley saw a small initial jolt to circulation and revenue, sparked by the brighter look and expanded coverage of hot topics like immigration. But the gains have been erased as the area economy struggles. Bakersfield Californian Chief Executive Richard Beene says the steps were necessary to keep the paper relevant, but he has advice for others considering a similar redesign: “Don’t expect it to turn around circulation or revenue overnight. It’s not a magic bullet.”

Consultant Alan Jacobson launched a broadside against the redesign Friday, saying it needed to “concentrate on content rather than cosmetics.”

In these troubled times for newspapers, it’s important to note that “readership” and “revenue” are conspicuous by their absence from virtually all the words that have been published about Orlando’s redesign. Instead, much has been made of the cosmetic changes to come.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a redesign if somebody didn’t compare it to USA Today.

Update: And Mario Garcia writes about the black reverse nameplate.

The Chicago Tribune will launch a redesign in mid-September, Editor Ann Marie Lipinski told the staff today.

"We are committed to determining the basic architecture and sectioning of the paper within 30 days; deciding on paging (how many and where) within 45 days; understanding our staffing levels throughout the paper in 60 days; and being ready to launch a rethought and redesigned Tribune within 90 days in mid-September."

Romenesko’s got the full memo.

Charles Apple has the definitive post on the upcoming Orlando redesign, including a Q&A with Bo Burton, images, the works. So go there.

OK, here’s a passel of additional before-and-after Orlando prototype pages for the upcoming redesign, again thanks to Bo Burton. More pages after the jump.

The Washington Post debuted a new Style & Arts section on Aug. 26. It’s a merger of two regular Sunday sections.

Deputy Assistant Managing Editor for News Art Denny Brack and Style Design Director Martha Wright created the new design. Martha says:

Changes include enhanced Web keys, better use of color positions, more air on inside pages and the front, and frameless photos. Content is organized under Sounds (music), Stages (theater and dance), Screens (movies, TV, Internet) and Sights (the visual Arts). We've added Robin Givhan as a Sunday columnist, and created a Conversations page, anchored by a regular Q&A. There's also a Studio page, where local artists can explain their pieces in their own words. We'll have a doubletruck each week to showcase the work of staff photographers or take a closer look at other topics that demand that size and scope (normally it'd stand alone — happened to be a jump for our debut issue).

More pages after the jump:

The Toronto Star redesigned a couple weeks ago. (OK, three. Or so.) SND's Canada blog had some (more timely) coverage here and here. There's a new body face, Torstar Text, which is set at 10.25 on 11, as opposed to the old 9.9 on 10. The paper also will be gradually shrinking to a width of 11.5 inches between August and October. There's an online reader's guide here.

Antonia Zerbisias, the Star's media columnist, solicited some expert opinion about the redesign, including Lucie Lacava ("... less distinctive, more generic. Perhaps 'generic' is too harsh. It's been simplified a lot.") and Tony Sutton (Style: "very, very readable". Content: "... it looks like it's got less news in it.")

Here are some before-and-afters (afters on the right) with thanks to Assistant Managing Editor, Design Charlie Kopun:

More pages after the jump:

Here are some before-and-afters (afters on the right) of the Virginian-Pilot’s new design.

And here are some new inside pages:

The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk launched its much-awaited redesign today. I'll have a more in-depth before-and-after look later today. Meantime, the SND folks have some of the new pages up.

The Star-Telegram of Fort Worth launched a redesign on Sunday. They’ve narrowed the web width and turned Page One into a billboard for the rest of the paper.

In the four-page reader’s guide (PDF), Executive Editor Jim Witt writes:

You also need us to respect your busy life. Our quick-read formats will help you zero in on the information important to you, to speed you on your way. We think they also bring a jolt of energy and innovation to the paper.

This seems to be, in some ways, and extension of the paper’s 2004 redesign when the Sunday and Monday front pages became more teaser-oriented.

You can see what readers are saying about the changes here.

Here are some pages from the Sunday and Monday papers:

The Globe and Mail, “Canada's National Newspaper,” (329,923 daily/416,584 Saturday) launched a redesigned newspaper today, the culmination of a two-year “reimagination” process. Says Editor-in-Chief Edward Greenspon:

We wanted to be smarter, more accessible, more Web-paper integrated and more visually oriented.

Oh yes. And we didn’t want to give up an inch of ground on the qualities (strong reporting, great writing, seriousness of purpose) that have made The Globe and Mail an important part of Canadian society for more than 160 years.

They’ve also added a new lifestyle section, Globe Life, shifted business agate to the web and launched ReportonBusiness.com. Here’s the half-page guide to the redesign published in today’s paper (PDF here).

The redesign was an in-house job by a team led by Editorial Design Director David Pratt and Assistant Art Director David Woodside.

Here are some pages from today’s edition, courtesy of Michael Bird, Deputy Managing Editor, Presentation and Editing.

The Chicago Sun-Times launched a redesigned, more locally focused paper today.

As evidenced by the emphasized "Chicago" in the flag, they're beefing up their local orientation and adding more features such as
"Chicagopedia," a dictionary of Chicago words; "This Much I Know" where "interesting people tell you their secrets to a good life;" and "24/7," a 24-hour crime and mayhem roundup. The Sun-Times has been struggling in the Chicago market. Sun-Times Media's revenue fell 8.6% last year compared with the Tribune's 1.3% drop.

As far as the design, it will "make it more accessible, more modern and more readable for you, the reader. Because it's all about you."

Here's a guide to the new features. (Same thing here in a one-page PDF.)

Sun-Times advertising/marketing columnist Lewis Lazare writes:

Unexpected and uniquely local news stories will get top priority in the refreshed newspaper, which some ads in the rebranding campaign will reference as reflecting the "real Chicago."

Reflecting the increasing importance of the Web as a news resource, many stories will encourage readers to jump to the Web for additional specific content that might be tightly focused on Chicago — such as highly localized neighborhood guides — or links to the Web's best content on a range of topics.

Former Sun-Timeser Robb Montgomery's got a podcast interview with Editor Michael Cooke and Kenney Marlatt at SND posts a link to a video by Publisher John Cruickshank.

Outside reaction is starting to come in. Alan Jacobson says it's "one of the best redesigns seen in years."

With all the vim and vigor of Bakersfield, KC and Norfolk, the redesigned Sun-Times is bound to get some eyeballs, making the Chicago Tribune or award-winning Mercury News look like your father's Oldsmobile.

But my old friend Steve Rhodes, a veteran Chicago media observer and proprieter of the excellent Beachwood Reporter, is less taken with it:

Ho-hum. While there are some decent elements, it still looks like a dowdy newspaper. And those full-length photos of columnists are nothing but a distraction. But the real problem is one that every redesign faces — that old lipstick on a pig thing. Unfortunately, nobody wants to improve the pig. It's not that hard to understand. Campbell's can change the label all they want, but if their soup still sucks, their soup still sucks. If the Sun-Times — or any paper — wants more readers, you have to make a better newspaper (website not only included, but emphasized). And making a better, must-read newspaper means quality journalism, not "Chicagopedia" entries that purport to explain what words such as "buddy" mean in to people who live here. Redesigns always work around the edges, and in areas like packaging health and shopping news, but never seem to spark better ways to actually report on the city — and that's the guts of any newspaper. Just once I'd like to see a redesign that also gamed out an investment and redeployment of reporters throughout the city, instructed reporters to always wonder during an interview why they're being lied to, and, say, mandated that each reporter file at least one Freedom of Information request a month. That would be a newspaper that would show readership gains.

Also, a couple weeks ago, Rhodes reported:

When asked why the paper didn't invest more in the paper's website, Editor-in-Chief Michael Cooke was heard to say that nobody believes what they read on the Internet.

Here are more pages from today's paper:

The San Antonio Express-News has changed up its front page, saying it needs to reflect the reality of readers being "more informed, more wired &emdash; and yes, much more busy taking it all in."

There's an "interactive" graphic online that briefly explains the changes.

"Change comes today with a new format designed around two key goals. First, we are providing readers with a larger menu of items, allowing the front page to be a better window into the rest of the paper. Second, we're doing more to emphasize and develop our best story of the day, focusing as much as possible on local news you won't find anywhere else."

And here, from Paul Wallen of the San Diego Union-Tribune, is a Q&A with Dean Lockwood, design director at the Express-News:

From the home office in San Diego, the Top 5 questions about the new San Antonio Express-News front page:

5.) There seem to be three central ideas in the new Express-News front page format: A pair of rails that you're calling "zippers," a "tab on broadsheet" emphasis above the fold and a promo at the top that focuses on selling one inside story in a big way, rather than a variety of inside content. Can you provide some background on each of these changes and the goals behind them?

Those are the key themes. The promos were an easy call -- our promos the last few years have been weak mainly because too much junk was being shoved into them -- too many topics and too many words. The more stuff in there, the busier they got and they less effective they were. Really, the promo should be viewed as a kind of advertisement. So our new promos will feature a single item, strong. They also won't follow any kind of template. Other than general font choices, it will be a different approach every day. Adrian Alvarez, who joined the paper midway into the front-page development process, took the lead on the new promo looks. He's really brought a fresh energy to them.

The zippers (these things just gotta have goofy catch names, I think) were a challenge. We've never been a "rail paper" but with the new emphasis on the web and multiple "hits," we knew we'd have to get on board with this in some form. Honestly, I started playing with two narrow rails just for the novelty -- I don't think anyone else is doing it. (Hmm … perhaps there's a reason for that?) At first it was just to see if I could make it work visually. But as I played with it, it started making more sense. We gave each zipper it's own mission. The left one is basically our hard news briefing while the right one is a bit of a catch-all. A home for the "fun" news stuff, utility info like sports scores and, of course, online promotion. That all worked itself out pretty easily. Designing the news between the zippers was a bit more of an adventure, and it produced an unexpected benefit.

The whole "tab on broadsheet" thing was an unexpected result of flanking both sides of the page with the zippers. I found I couldn't design the 1A lineup the same way -- with semi-strips, "muted" lead stories and all those other compromise things we do to parse the play of the news each day. The zipper format started forcing me into making a commitment to one or maybe two items up top. A bit like a tabloid makes a choice on its story of the day. The more I thought about that, the more I thought that was a good thing. We're a broadsheet, of course, so we have room for a few more stories. But in general, we're going to try to emphasize our best local story strong up top each day. Adrian Alvarez really gave me the confidence to really push this.

4.) You have been prototyping published lineups in preparation for launching the new format. What kind of challenges did you face as you went through that process?

Between myself and Adrian, there was a good bit of prototyping. And you know what? It was HARD. Much harder than I thought it would be. All the "rules" for designing a broadsheet front just didn't seem to work. It really is like desiging in a different page format. The biggest thing we noted was the need to go relatively simple and clean on the down-page stories. There's just so much "stuff" on this page that we're really cognizant of the junk factor. We'll have to watch that a lot.

3.) What kind of flexibility has been built into the new format to handle different types of news days or breaking news?

Well, our flexibilty was tested on the very first night -- got live, very vertical art -- naturally, something we hadn't prototyped! Maybe not quite the package I would have liked to have wrestled with on the first night, but I think we pulled it off. Beyond that, the whole idea of "zippers" was for flexibility. One or both can zip down to accommodate big news play. Other papers have similar policies for their rails. My best, unintentionally funny quote came while trying to explain what sorts of news would warrant lowering the zippers: "Castro dies -- zippers go down." Yes, I said it. In a room full of editors. Took me a good 10 seconds to figure out what all the smirking and snickering was about.

2.) Does the new format represent any changes in content and editing, or is it strictly a change in how the front page is being packaged for readers?

It calls for a lot of changes in thinking, mostly. Especially about our 1A lineup -- and about what constitutes a "lead story." A traditional broadsheet format provides lots of compromise possibilities for editors. This format (as with a tabloid) forces us to make a commitment. That's very different thinking. The zippers provide a logistical challenge for our copy desk. They've reorganized to have a page one editor dedicated each night to focus on the lead package and the zippers info.

1.) And the number one question is … The opening statement in your users guide describes this as "the most fundamental format change in modern Express-News history – way bigger than Wingo." What is Wingo, and what kind of impact has it made on the Express-News?

Hah! That's an inside joke. In fact, I'm not sure if some of our younger designers will even have a clue about that. Years back, when this was a two-paper town, the Express-News was locked in a death match with the San Antonio Light. Wingo was a bingo-like game that was promoted brazenly on the front page. Tacky as all get-out -- but apparently it worked, as the Light eventually went down for the count.

LA Observed notes today that over the weekend the LA Times has scaled back some of the front-page typography that was changed last fall, apparently eliminating the Titling Gothic Compressed and some of the stacked decks. He also says Times editor Jim O'Shea was seen escorting around Tony Majeri, design legend and former Chicago Tribune senior editor for innovation a couple weeks back.

The Arizona Republic has retooled its Monday newspaper "for busy people," editor Ward Bushee says.

Luke Knox of the Republic says the new Monday edition features

... shorter stories, more short-form information and content to help readers kick-start their week. It's basically the antithesis of the usual Monday product you may find from a number of papers, filled with retread stories and no real news to sink your teeth into.

The new Monday Republic is compressed into three sections: an expanded A section that includes the Valley & State and Biz sections folded inside, an expanded Sports section, and an expanded Features section. Section fronts have one, (mostly) non-jumping story and a series of lists, refers and other devices to get the reader into the section.

Redesign work was done primarily by Tracy Collins and Bill Pliske, and executed by the design staff.

>Today's edition designed for busy people [Arizona Republic]

The New York Observer, every literate New Yorker’s favorite pink newspaper, relaunched as a tabloid on Wednesday.

It’s printed on 30 pound stock, with a four-page wrap on 50 pound stock (the page above is the front of the wrap). Location, the real estate section, moves to the back cover. Typographically, they’re using Dispatch, Benton Sans and Mercury for display type. The front-page flag is by Jim Parkinson.

David Carr fretted in The New York Times:

The Observer redesign, however, is not simply a redesign, but a change in fundamentals, an altering of the product’s DNA.

As a technology, the new format works fine, more manageable, easier to navigate. But as a thing — and the physical properties of a print publication are more important in the digital age, not less so — The Observer has been trimmed in a way that makes it fit in all too well.

Does nostalgic-for-the-status-quo Carr have $2 million a year to cover the Observer's status-quo losses?

>A Note on the Redesign [New York Observer]
>A Cheeky Broadsheet’s Tabloid Makeover [The New York Times]
>Who Moved David Carr's ‘Observer’? [New York Magazine]
>Paper Cuts [New York Post]

The Idaho State Journal in Pocatello launched a redesign Monday. Editor Ian H. Fennell wrote in his weblog Feb. 3 about the focus group process.

[T]he overall response to our new look and content was overwhelmingly positive.

Most of our focus group participants said the new Journal was a dramatic improvement over the current paper and they urged us to follow through with the changes.

We took that advice and are proud to say that the new Journal is a totally reader-driven creation. You told us what you wanted and we listened.

Consultant Alan Jacobson has more details and page images at his site.

Los Angeles Times Editor James O’Shea on Wednesday announced major changes on the horizon for the paper, including a redesign. If you seem to remember that the Times just redesigned part of the paper recently, you’d be right. But this, O’Shea says, will be a “real redesign.”

I am going to establish a second working group from the newsroom to help me with another major challenge we face, redesigning the print newspaper to make it an effective backbone for latimes.com.

Sometime this fall, the Los Angeles Times, like every other major paper including the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and others, will adapt a 48-inch press web that will create a newspaper that will be slightly narrower than the one we currently publish.

There is no stopping this conversion. The entire industry is moving that way. Even if we were not going to make any newsroom changes, the new press web width would probably require a redesign.

This time, though, we are going to do a real redesign, one that questions and challenges every section of the newspaper, a redesign that relates individual sections to the newspaper as a whole.

This effort will come from within the newsroom. We will lead it, but we will also include in our working group some thoughtful colleagues from outside the newsroom, people who have expertise and experience in areas unfamiliar to journalists.

Ideally I would like to take a year to rethink everything we do. But we don't have the luxury of that much time. Innovation is something we have to do in the newspaper every day. It is an ongoing process.

So we probably will do a phased redesign that will play out over the next year. The redesign working group will work this out.

>Editor James O’Shea unveils Web initiative at Times [L.A. Times]
>James O’Shea’s address to Times staff [L.A. Times]

Here are some before-and-afters from the Rocky Mountain News. New pages on the right. In the larger images I’ve adjusted the new pages to reflect the smaller size. Update: Also, the Rocky’s opened up access to its electronic edition until midnight Friday, so take a look for yourself.

Update2: Roger Black weighs in in the comments on the previous post.

There are actually many spreads in the paper, particularly at the front of each section , which you don't show, and neither does the web site's ActivePaper PDF reader. But if you see the printed edition, the size, the layout-as-spreads, the increased color, the no-jump booking, the more informal headlines style, it begins to look like a magazine.

<snip>

John Temple has been talking about the redesign on his blog for months, and there have been many opportunities for readers to tell the paper what they want, and they have. The little poll on the logo development is part of a continuing process to bring readers in on the defintion of the Rocky brand. The question here is, "Is it The Rocky or is it Rocky Mountain News?" The staff is extremely interested to see how people react to that, because they went pretty far down the road (as you can see) to actually changing the name of the paper. And the defnition of a brand is never finished, nor is a paper's design. These are processes, not events.

Here are some spreads from today’s paper:

Roger Black worked on the project, and has a few thoughts and pages on his blog. The Rocky also has a blog post about the redesign, with comments enabled. Editor John Temple has already chimed in in the comments.

The Rocky Mountain News in Denver and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel both launched redesigns today. Both papers have also reduced their size. The indefatigable Charles Apple has more details at VisualEditors (Rocky, Milwaukee).

They look nice, but nothing too radical here, from what I can see (my rant on that here). Some new fonts and some general cleaning up. Rocky editor John Temple writes the paper’s “conceived more like a magazine,” but just says that in relation to where columns are placed. Is that a larger philosphical shift as well? The front does look more magazine-like (Alan Jacobson says the photo’s “ambiguous and passive”), but is that just because they’re kicking off a big honkin’ 33-part series?

And this bugs me. There’s an audio slideshow by Temple on the evolution of the flag through the redesign process. (Those flags, by the way, have the distinct and lovely smell of Jim Parkinson, but that’s speculation Parkinson wasn't involved, Roger Black says.) You can also vote for which one you would pick. But why do that now, when it doesn’t matter? To me, that almost seems more contemptuous of reader opinion than not asking at all. If you really cared what readers thought about that, you’d do it before you actually made the decision.

The public radio show Studio 360 devoted part of this week’s episode to the new Wall Street Journal. Design writer and former I.D. Magazine editor Chee Pearlman weighs in with about 5 minutes of commentary.

It just feels like a little Mini-Me of the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal Jr. It’s cute, it’s little, it’s a little bit more friendly. You’d be lying to say that you’re doing it for the convenience of the reader. It’s lost an inch and a half on each side in order for them to save somewhere in the neighborhood of $18 million a year. That’s not for the reader. Trust me on that one.

In the new spirit of “unboxing,” John Moore of Brand Autopsy unboxes the new Wall Street Journal:

Now, if you’re like me, when you think of The Wall Street Journal, you inevitably think of Tupac (don’t tell me you don’t). And you wonder “why has no one given us a Tupac-fueled love-letter to the Journal? Wonder no more, yo:

(Thanks, Tom!)

The new narrower, Mario Garcia-redesigned Wall Street Journal is out today. Free on the newsstands and online today, apparently. Romenesko’s got links. Here are some of today’s section fronts and a page about the new design from the reader’s guide. Here’s a PDF of that page.

Garcia says he was already getting positive reader e-mails before dawn. But for his part, web designer Greg Storey says “who in their infinite ivy-league 5th Avenue wisdom spilt McClatchy all over this morning’s Wall Street Journal?”

Update: Here's the full PDF of the Reader's Guide.

The Wall Street Journal, shrinking its page size by three inches on Jan. 2, will unveil the Mario Garcia redesigned version today in New York. The move to a 12-inch-wide front page brings the Journal in line with most American broadsheets (except The New York Times, which makes the switch next August April) and is expected to save Dow Jones $18 million a year.

Executives and advertisers are happy, but some Journal journalists aren’t. “Lopping a column off the paper is not a quality move,” reporter E. S. Browning told The New York Times. “It will be harder to do long-form journalism when there is less space on Page One.” Editors say to compensate for the lost space, the number of pages will be increased, some statistical information will be cut, and the paper will be more tightly edited.

Garcia told the Times the narrower format presented a challenge. “It was like dressing Kate Moss.”

Update: PR Week has a Q&A with Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger.

Did the redesign that you did in 2002 not go far enough? Many of the themes seem to be the same - such as navigation?

Steiger: You can't do everything at once. Remember, when we made those changes, our readers had been used to black and white, tombstone vertical layout on page one. What we gave them was an additional section three days a week, plus color on all of the section fronts, and I just didn't want to produce too many coronaries out there. It worked; readers liked it. But [in the] meantime, time is moving very, very fast in the news space, and the acceleration of the use of the web, including our own Web site, for readers to stay in touch with news, meant that it was time to go into the well again.

The rejigged Journal will also brim with summaries of all sorts. The paper plans to digest news from other news sources in one column, summarize "the key news by industry and news topic" in another, and even condense the paper's long features to "draw out the key meaning." Sounds like they'll be paying royalties to USA Today, doesn't it?

Previous coverage:
>Shrinking the Journal (Oct. 11, 2005)
>“Reimagining” the Wall Street Journal (Feb. 20, 2006)
>WSJ 3.0 (June 2, 2006)

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.”

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]

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%.

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.

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

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):

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?

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]

Reaction abounds to the new LAT design. In addition to the comments from the fine readers of this blog, Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog (Drum lives in the L.A. area) says it’s “exactly the look of the Times’ corporate parent, the Chicago Tribune. So now the Times looks like every faceless second-tier metro daily in the country. Yippee.” His commenters mostly go negative as well.

Kevin Roderick’s L.A. Observed says “I liked the Sunday page better when I could only see the upper half. Opened full it has too many competing fonts for my taste and a personality that screams cacophony rather than edited order.”

Designer Jim Coudal says it’s “lovely” and calls the multiple decks on the lead story “A step forward that comes from looking backwards.”

More comments on the LAT’s Opinion L.A. blog and on this L.A. Voice post. Some are upset at the reduction from seven stories to four on Page One (you’ll note today’s front, above, has six). The inevitable USA Today comparisons also arise.

My favorite comments so far: “Headlines, in the main section no less, where most of the words aren’t even capitalized? That’s the very essence of second-rate.” and “The front page looks like it can kick more ass than before. And in a newspaper, I think that’s a good thing.”

On the other coast, the St. Pete Times published a bunch of the more than 4,000 responses they got to its redesign today. In response to comments, the paper is tweaking some things, including going to a heavier weight of Brown behind the color screens and making some changes to puzzles and the weather page.

A redesigned front page and A-section of the Los Angeles Times dropped today, with some bold new typography, more breakouts and some other changes. News Design Director Michael Whitley graciously favored me with some details.

The new design was created by LAT Creative Director Joseph Hutchinson. It continues the work done in 2002 on the features sections and will migrate to the California, Business and Sports sections in the first quarter of next year.

Typographically, the lead headline (for 2-columns or bigger) is Titling Gothic Compressed light or medium. The headline for one column leads or one column news stories above the fold is LA Gothic Bold Extra condensed (custom draw of Titling Gothic). Serif headlines are LA Headline and LA Headline bold, which is a custom draw of Kis).

Other new things are large skyboxes for weekend edition (above), the bulldog/early Sunday edition that is out Saturday, and smaller ones for Sunday final. No skyboxes for the rest of the week.

Headlines are down-style instead of the traditional Up Style.

There’s a new graphics pallet and some screened colors for boxes and breakouts on the inside.

Here’s the A1 note from Editor Dean Baquet (couldn’t find it online):

Starting today, you will notice major changes in the appearance of the Los Angeles Times. On Sundays, pictures at the top of the page will highlight stories and sections inside. Headlines will come in a greater variety of styles and sizes. On inside pages, more boxes and graphics will offer background on major news stories. On weekdays, the changes are even more pronounced. Column One, long a showcase for The Times’ best story-telling, will be presented more dramatically. And the weekday and Saturday editorial pages will move from the California section to the main news section. These changes will highlight our best work, make the paper more visually engaging and help readers find whatever interests them throughout the paper. You will see more changes in the coming months, all the result of much study of what our readers have told us they want from The Times.
DEAN BAQUET, Editor

Here are some inside A pages from today’s paper:

Here are today’s section fronts from the St. Pete Times, which launched its redesign today.

The St. Pete Times unveils its new design tomorrow morning, but here, thanks to Assistant Managing Editor/Presentation Patty Cox is a look at a recent crop of before-and-after prototypes. Cox writes:

Tomorrow’s St. Petersburg Times will have a vibrant, colorful new look. The mission of our new design was to combine our rich tradition of journalistic service with some fresh ways of keeping Tampa Bay residents “in the know” while respecting their time. The improvements to the newspaper are the most sweeping in a decade. They include more than a dozen new features, including two new Sunday sections, and a conversion to the 50-inch web.

Here’s a guide to the new look.

In mentioning the $25 million spent on press upgrades and other improvements, Times CEO and Editor Paul Tash extols the Times’ independence from Wall Street.

The capital investments leading up to the new look were a lot to bite off, but they might have been more difficult elsewhere. Most newspapers are owned as part of big public companies. With shareholders pressing for quarterly profits, they have a hard time looking past the problems of the moment to the possibilities that lie ahead.

The Times, on the other hand, is an independent newspaper, one of the few remaining in American journalism. Like any other business, we like profits, too, and we’re on the prowl against needless expense. But we’re also willing to spend a buck today, even if the payoff won’t come right away.

More pages after the jump.

>At the Times, we’re betting on the future [St. Petersburg Times]

>The New Look [St. Petersburg Times]

St. Petersburg Times Executive Editor Neil Brown previews the long-awaited Oct. 16 redesign of the paper today. He says the changes include narrowing the page width, “More news summaries and graphics to keep you ‘in the know,’” and more references to content on the Web.

Also in Florida redesign news, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel debuted some changes last Sunday. Nicole Bogdas has the details.

>For your Times, a new look [St. Petersburg Times]
>Sun-Sentinel's new look [Nicole Bogdas @ Visual Editors]

The Sacramento Bee has made some changes to its section front design, tweaking the mix of stories and promoting more stories inside the paper. (Above: Old page left, new page right)

[Robert Casey, the assistant managing editor for visuals,] said the intent of the front page redesign as well as similar changes made on the covers of Metro, Business, Sports and Scene (as well as weekly Sunday sections such as Forum) is to help time-frazzled readers navigate the paper.

Readership studies, Casey said, show that people often don’t know about interesting stories inside the paper but would read them if they did. People aren’t aware of these stories because papers have done a poor job promoting them.

As a result, the new front-page design includes what are called “teases” to “5 stories to talk about today” with short, snappy headlines and photos, all placed above the masthead. In fact, a photo is now sometimes integrated into the masthead; such tampering with the masthead was strictly off-limits in the past.

>Public editor: Urgency to attract readers drives paper’s redesign [Sacramento Bee]

The Telegraph-Journal of Saint John, New Brunswick, launches a redesign today. Lucie Lacava consulted on the project.

Publisher James C. Irving said:

“The Telegraph-Journal is one of the most important papers in the Maritimes, and what Lucie has done is given it a design that reflects the importance and the stature of the paper.”

Lacava said the Telegraph-Journal’s previous understated design simplified her task.

“It gave us a good starting point,” she said. “The design was very old school and that of a small-town newspaper. My mandate, and what I wanted the design to do, was give it a more worldy look and make it look more like a big-city paper.”

On the typography front, the redesign uses Font Bureau’s Whitman Display for headlines and display, Font Bureau’s Vonnes (also used in last fall's Reforma Group redesign) for navigation and graphics and Porchez Typofonderie’s Le Monde Journal for body text.

They also published an eight-page special section section (PDF) on the redesign.

(Thanks, Adam!)

More pages from today’s redesigned Kansas City Star:

(Thanks, Charles!)

The Kansas City Star’s much-anticipated redesign, which hit some of the features sections a couple weeks ago (see here and here), reached the front page and the rest of the paper today.

Star Editor Mark Zieman has a Q&A here.

Aren’t you just using color and glitz to attract people who don't like to read?
No. If you hate Pepsi, putting it in a pretty can won’t make you drink it. It’s the same with non-readers and newspapers. Instead, we're trying to make the paper more useful - and easier to use - for people who already read us. We already have more than 1 million readers every week - but not every day. We're working to make our paper more relevant, enticing and informative for our occasional readers. We actually believe that comes from better news content, not a prettier design. But if we can give you both, why not do it?

There’s a Web page about the redesign here, with links to, among other things, a Flash slideshow of new pages, a list of the Top 10 changes, an audio slideshow of the new press operations and some PDFs of pages from the 20-page special section on the redesign.

Garcia Media consulted on the job, with Kelly Frankeny as the art director. Jeanne Meyer, Managing Editor for Visuals and New Initiatives, and Tom Dolphens, AME for Art and Design, led the team from the Star.

Mario Garcia penned a column for the special section.

Foremost in our thinking:

1. Catering to readers in a hurry, like you and me. So we have worked hard to create navigational systems that start on Page One. We know that you may have time only to scan the headlines in the morning, so Page One eases that process. We also know that readers appreciate when we alert them to related stories or coverage online, so we will systematically do that as well. The Star, like all modern newspapers, moves into an era for readers who are tech savvy and live in a multimedia world.

Advertising Age has an interview with Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz on the WSJ’s upcoming redesign.

Changes will include versions of the front page’s “What’s News” feature in other sections, more articles on “what it means” and fewer on “what happened” and more themed content.

Their plans are still evolving — 20 focus groups have been conducted, and another 60 are scheduled to take place once the next Journal prototype arrives in June. But one thing’s for sure: Journal 3.0 will take its cues from the Internet. The newspaper has run The Wall Street Journal Online for 10 years, and the new print edition takes into account how the Web version continues to change consumers’ expectations.

<snip>

“Navigation and being able to benefit from content in context are very much themes of the digital age,” said Mr. Crovitz, who is also exec VP at Dow Jones, The Journal’s owner. “There is a great opportunity for the newspaper to help us overcome information overload by helping us, once a day, put the content in context.”

Of course, not all papers, especially smaller ones, can spend whatever the Journal is laying out for [Mario] Garcia and a parade of focus groups on a redesign, but all papers can take an unflinching look at their story forms, their design and their content mix with the purposing of asking the question: Is this serving the needs, desires and expectations of today’s web-conditioned readers?

There is, at last, a growing sense of urgency in the newspaper industry that change is inevitable not only to maintain social relevance but to preserve financial viability. Well-heeled papers like the Journal may lead the way on some sorts of change (although much of the most creative innovation is being done at smaller papers), but every newspaper now has the chance, and the excuse, for unlimited reinvention.

Incidentally, since we’re all about the minutiae of design around here, note for the record that about three months ago the Journal started putting skyboxes above the nameplate on its front page.

>L. Gordon Crovitz Ushers in Journal 3.0 [Advertising Age]
>Print 3.0: Lessons from the Web [First Draft]

Folha de S. Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil, launched its “reimagined” newspaper on Sunday. Garcia Media consulted on the job, with Paula Ripoll art directing for Garcia Media and Massimo Gentile for Folha. You can read what Mario Garcia wrote about Folha’s new philoshopy in Spanish here (and in Portuguese here). Here’s a rough excerpt:

3. The new definition of the concept of “news”

When one of first journalism text books was written in 1918, “news” was defined as: Something I found out today that I did not know yesterday.

The new definition is, without a doubt: Something that I understand TODAY, but that I found out about YESTERDAY.

As readers, we look for an analysis, an explanation. And the print newspaper is an effective media to do this.

These three axes that mark the present tendency in the world of media, have been the pillars that sustain the philosophy of the visual and journalistic “rethinking” of Folha and they have been translated in the following aspects:

• To facilitate the navigation of the content (allowing the reader to arrive at the news without haste but without pause)
• To accentuate the informative hierarchies (giving reader guidelines about what is more or less important)
• To achieve the surprise effect (through creativity, modernity and intelligence when presenting/displaying the content)
• To value the exclusive contents of investigation and analysis (charactersitic of the newspaper’s identity)

Folha is considered by its readers as a newspaper that is “user friendly,” and the philosophy of the redesign intensifies that relationship with the reader, respecting their different ways of reading a newspaper.

Here are some more pages from the KC Star redesign. Wednesday’s Food section and Thursday’s entertainment tab, Preview.

The redesign of the Kansas City Star, slated to debut June 5, gets a preview in FYI, the Star’s feature section today. Here’s a guide to the new section.

The Star’s got new presses and is shrinking the page size about 20 percent. New typography is Poynter Old Style for body copy, Gotham and Miller for headlines and graphics, and Retina for most agate.

Classifed also got a remake.

And here’s an ad for the redesign.

Update: I neglected to mention that Garcia Media consulted on the redesign, with Kelly Frankeny as the art director

>As the new Star begins to unfold, FYI flies its colors first [Kansas City Star]

The Wall Street Journal, working on a Mario Garcia-led “reimagining” (and web-width reduction), is considering putting ads on its front page, The New York Observer reports today (scroll down).

Some news staffers aren’t thrilled:

“We understand this is a for-profit business,” one newsroom staffer said. “But an ad on the front page? That would really piss people off.”

>Off the Record [New York Observer] (via)

Thanks to Martin Huisman, here are some more De Morgen pages, including the books section, music, film and theater reviews and "Bis," which is "the story of the day."

De Morgen, a Belgian broadsheet, redesigned and switched to Berliner format today. Mario Garcia, who did the paper's last redesign in 1994, headed up the project with De Morgen art director Martin Huisman and Christian Fortanet of Garcia Media's Spain office.

The newspaper, which in 2004 won Europe's Best Designed Newspaper in the category 'national newspaper,' invested €100 million in a new printing plant that is capable of "waterless" printing, which supposedly makes for better reproduction. The press is also capable of printing color on every page, which Garcia took advantage of.

I am convinced that readers can never get enough color, but it is a matter of how one utilizes it. With a brand new printing machine, a new format, and the ability to do color on each page, DeMorgen was the ideal candidate for a total colorization or "wallpapering" effect, as I call it. Each of the section fronts is wallpapered with one of the five colors in the palette, but logos always appear against a white background, a reversal of years doing the opposite. Remember, we all colorized logos simply because we were not sure how color would ever reproduce, so the logo area was contained and a safe haven for a "touch of color" without the risks of overexposure. And, of course, this still applies today. If your color press is NOT good, then don't try color wallpapering at home, please.

But, undoubtedly, this is the beginning of what I see as greater and more efficient and experimental era of colorization for newspapers.

The typography: Gotham for section headers and the flag, Capitolium for headlines and body text, and ITC Conduit for summary decks, photo credits, graphics, etc.

Lode Vermeiren at his new Jumping Shark weblog has a lot of good coverage, including before and after comparisons and a nice review of the paper after looking at the real printed version.

The new lay-out consists of five columns per page, with quite a lot of whitespace. Sometimes photographs or illustrations span multiple columns, up to seven columns on one of the main stories. The headers of the different sections are clearly distincted from the content, and are quite clear. One thing I dislike is the lack of spaces in the section titles of more than one word, for example, "cultuur&media" (culture&media) versus "cultuur & media". Sure, it may be trendy (and I have to admit that I have used this in some of my own designs as well), but I'm afraid it is a trend that won't really last. All in all the design is really well balanced, and I'm ever more convinced of the Berliner format versus tabloid, which always feels crowded, making me tired just looking at it.

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.

The new free Baltimore Examiner tab dropped Wednesday, with a bigger circulation than the Baltimore Sun.

The design was developed by consultant Robb Montgomery, and elements of it have been working their way over the last couple of months into the other Philip Anschutz-owned Examiners in San Francisco and D.C. Robb writes:

Compared to recent flashy redesigns, The Examiner represents a kind of un-design 'redesign' — the goals we developed were based on a core desire to produce an upscale daily news tabloid that works hard to provide daily intelligence in a magazine-style form. A free tabloid with an upmarket quality standard is a first for a daily in the U.S. It also meant we weren't going to be designing a paper that relies on gimmicks to be noticed.

All that matters is that the new design reveal the character of the new Examiner — smart, interesting and relevant to your life today.

When you look at the page examples shown online please keep in mind that these ARE the inside pages - the ones that usually don't get a lot of attention from newspapers when it comes to planning sophisticated daily packages around the way people are living their lives these days. That all of the inside pages can be well-designed is a true measure of the success of this redesign and presages the work to come.

We've heard a lot lately about high-profile redesigns and sparkly new products in places like Tampa and Savannah and Bakersfield. But there's more going on out there than the latest Alan Jacobson or Mario Garcia joints.

Last month three small weeklies in Miami County, Kansas, the Miami County Republic, (5,000 circ.) the Osawatomie Graphic (3,000 circ.) and the Louisburg Herald (2,000 circ.) launched a new combined Weekend edition. It's aimed at younger readers and families who are moving into the county as Kansas City sprawl spreads south.

Publisher Greg Branson, a former assistant graphics editor and A1 designer at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, says "We're trying to give our readers the news and features coverage you would typically see from a metro, but focused on our specific region. ... It's been fun seeing the staff really rise to the occasion to put out a product most people wouldn't expect from a community newspaper."

Branson continues:

So far it's been a lot of fun. Weekend has been something that both our younger and veteran reporters have really enjoyed and it has allowed them to really stretch. In community newspapers, you don't often get a chance to do these kinds of stories — for example: regular long-form, issue-based news stories, or features about trends and things to do, or, for sports, preview stories and features that aren't just gamers.

From the beginning, we have been specifically targeting younger readers in the 16 to 45 age range. Our coverage area is outside the southern edge of the Kansas City metro area and is really growing. But more people moving here wasn't translating into more readers. Our traditional weeklies - focused on the communities, the city governments, club notes, births and obits, and sports - didn't appeal as readily to somebody just moving here. In fact, it informal discussions I had with some, it made them feel like outsiders because they didn't know the people the stories were about like the people who grew up here or have lived and worked here a long time.

So the idea behind Weekend is to produce an newspaper that won't ostracize our new residents, but instead introduce them to the area and the communities through issue-based stories instead of nuts-and-bolts stories. The response has been very positive from both our target market and from our long-time readers. We're also still publishing our three weeklies earlier in the week for our "traditional" readers.

For all the tabloid-skeptical designers, the response to our 30-inch (60-inch for those of you on metro presses) tab format has been overwhelmingly positive. By going to to the larger size, we actually have more ad inches to sell than if we stayed with our regular 25-inch page size. Also, since we're using two-different sizes of paper, it allowed us to keep a standard 11p column for all of our pubs — 6 col in our 3 weekly broadsheets and 5 in Weekend. That way we don't have to resize ads for different pubs, unless they're taller than 14 inches.

Producing something like this in a community newspaper setting isn't really any more difficult, you just have to be smarter with your resources. We made a commitment to the visual aspect by hiring a full-time photographer for the three papers, but that has cost me a reporter at one of the three papers. But other than that, it's the same as larger paper — we're often scrambling for visuals. We try to take the Joe Scopin (Washington Times early '90s SND big-time award winnner) approach to using what we have on hand when it comes to design. I'm doing some illos and some graphics, but overall we're trying to make use of handouts and whatever the reporters and photographer can shoot or grab when they're covering stuff. It's been fun to see the reporters start focusing on what visuals are going to go with their stories.

Alan Jacobson asks "If newspaper markets are so different, why do most papers look so much alike?"

Newspapers crave innovation but rarely deliver. Every few years a newspaper decides it's time to redesign. They go even further, claiming they've "re-imagined" and "re-engineered" the newspaper. The results more often than not?

Nada.

Newspapers squander this opportunity to re-invent themselves because their "unique" solutions are often clones from other papers.

It is, of course, early to assign much meaning to these numbers, but Alan Jacobson reports that, in the wake of the Bakersfield redesign two weeks ago:

1. Circulation is up, with 60 new starts and single-copy up 8-13 percent.

2. Advertising is up with 1,000 new inches in the redesigned Real Estate tab.

3. The anticipated deluge of complaints never materialized.

The Savannah Morning News (Morris Communications, 52,422 daily) introduced a redesign Monday. Designers Josh Jackson and Francie Krantz came through with pages. Francie also posted some details here.

The typography is Caslon FB, Relay, Miller for body copy and Big Caslon for section flags.

A couple of new inside pages:

The St. Petersburg Times relaunched its previously weekly tbt*/Tampa Bay Times tabloid as a weekday publication today. AME/Presentation Patty Cox was good enough to send some pages. She e-mails:

The designers working on the publication are Chris Kozlowski, who joined our staff in January from the Arizona Republic, Ellen Freiberg and Adam Newman. We tweaked the styles we used in the weekly publication to give the daily a newsier look and feel.

The Times also launched a redesign of its online portal, tampabay.com, which is a gateway to the daily paper, tbt and several other company publications.

Meanwhile, a judge ruled Friday that, pending a trial, the Times can continue to use the current name "so long as the 'tbt*' is seven times larger than the 'Tampa Bay Times.' " But they cannot use "Tampa Bay Times" name alone in the nameplate. The Tampa Tribune, which holds the trademark on "Tampa Times" is suing the St. Pete Times to stop the paper using "Tampa Bay Times." The ruling maintains the status quo, but as Times media critic Eric Deggans points out in his blog, the judge also said there's a "substantial likelihood" the Tribune will prevail at trial.

Previously: St. Pete Weekly Tab to Go Daily

Here are some more pages of the Bakersfield redesign. (Thanks, Bill!)

Design editor Glenn Hammett was good enough to send along an insider's perspective:

The basic structure of the section fronts consists of the flag area (generally used for short refers with some visual element), the color area down one or both sides, which we have come to call "The Paint" (can contain short but interesting stories or longer refers), and the white area in the center of the page (usually harder news stories presented in a more traditional manner). The dominant image on the page is usually in this white area, but be up in the flag area. It all depends on what’s available and what works. Though it is a fairly simple structure, it requires a lot of flexiblility and attention to detail to make it work. It is so dependent on what images are available that we can’t really plan what is going in what position ahead of time. We basically throw all of the elements on the page and start moving them around and scaling them up and down until we find the combination that works best.

Because there is so much going on with photos and color, we have kept the typography very simple. Dutch for the body type, Poynter for the heads and Mercury for special heads and labels.

The implementation of the design was chiefly overseen by myself and Assistant Managing Editor Steve Mullen. Billy Simkins and Bill Ramsey design most of the news fronts and Mike Borjon, Kent Kuehl and Carol Duran design most of the feature pages.

The Bakersfield Californian launched its redesign today. Consultant Alan Jacobson worked on the project.

Californian Executive Editor Mike Jenner writes:

When we embarked on this project, we set out some important goals.

First, we wanted our front page to be striking — even arresting. The new look involves design techniques more commonly found in magazines than in most newspapers, but quality photographs and the ability to print great color are two of our strengths. We think the new approach makes the page more visually appealing.

Second, we wanted to address the issues of time-starved readers. More and more readers tell us their lifestyles are busier than ever before. Many aspects of this design address this reality.

The newspaper's online version redesigned as well. The site stopped running AP content in November, as E&P writes:

Bakersfield.com also will continue to expand its roster of blogs and community journalism. The new Current Affairs blog, begun Feb. 9, is designed to direct readers to particularly insightful or interesting coverage of national issues, partially to fill a hole left when the site stopped running Associated Press content in November. Owens experimented with dropping the AP stories in order to focus on local coverage. After receiving only one complaint about the change, the paper dropped their contract with the AP, effective today.

Although the Current Affairs blog has started out slow, with only three entries in its three weeks, Owens expects it to pick up as a portal to outstanding big-issue coverage "from The New York Times to a paper in India" rather than the "generic content" provided by AP. The blog, like several others on the site, will be run by Steve Swenson, who Owens expects to contribute much more frequently once things have calmed down after the redesign.

>Welcome to the new Bakersfield Californian [Bakersfield Californian]
>What do you think of the new Californian? [Bakersfield.com]
>Welcome to the new Bakersfield.com [Bakersfield.com]
>Bakersfield Californian Rolls Out Web Redesign, Sans AP [Editor & Publisher]

Here's the Garcia Media redesign of Mid Day, a Mumbai tabloid. It was redesigned three years ago by consultant Peter Ong. Mario Garcia says:

Peter made Mid Day look contemporary and young. We have taken it a step further, to fuse it more with online edition and to offer more secondary readings for an audience that is mostly 18-30, in a country where 62% of the population is under 35. And lots of them. Mumbai is also the capital of the film industry, Bollywood, so we had a ball introducing touches of "show biz" sparkle. Jan Kny, of Garcia Media Europe, in Hamburg, was art director for us on this project.

Mario Garcia continues his march across the subcontinent with three redesigns launching within a week.

Business Line, an Indian financial daily published in Chennai by The Hindu, unveiled its redesign Feb. 24. Mid Day, a Mumbai tabloid, relaunched Monday. And Frontline, a bi-weekly magazine published by The Hindu, will debut its new look March 2.

The new Business Line, Garcia says, is "functional, modern and easy to scan."

The comprehensive re-design of the paper, three years after a similar change, is a response to the changing times reflecting a growing economy. The design is meant to be appropriate to the paper's content, attractive to its readers and advertisers, and one that captures the spirit of the times.

Presenting the features of the re-designed Business Line, Dr Garcia said the re-design had 10 distinct elements to it. These included making it easier to navigate the pages with indexes and the like, a hierarchy of stories on each page, offbeat stories, more pictures and infographics, a new typographic system that is easy to read, classic and elegant, and easy links to the online edition of the paper.

More Business Line pages after the jump, and later today, a look at Mid Day.

St. Pete Times media critic Eric Deggans has a feature in today's paper on Mario Garcia and his "reimagining" of the Wall Street Journal, which will launch a redesigned and narrower paper next year.

"It's basically a rethinking . . . (according to) how people receive information today," Garcia said later, his Cuban accent flavoring his words. "Everything is on the table. How many sections? How much fusion with the Internet? Page-by-page, section-by-section, we are doing an absolute autopsy of the newspaper."

Journal managing editor Paul Steiger will drop only a few tidbits about the new design, including a liberal sprinkling of Web addresses and online information, an index to individuals appearing in the newspaper and a possible fashion section.

Garcia reasons that an audience raised on cable TV and the Internet needs a more portable, navigable newspaper.

"In five years, you will hit a generation of readers who don't remember life without the Internet," said Garcia, a 59-year-old father of four who enjoys youth-oriented tabloids such as the Times' tbt. "People who are coming from . . . the screen of the Internet are used to reading within the confines of a smaller place and transfer more quickly to the tabloid."

U.S. newspapers make most of their revenue from advertising, where clients are charged by the size of each ad. So a move to tabloid would shrink the size of full-page ads, cutting revenue by 22 percent, Jacobson said.

"There's not a publisher in the world who will accept a 22 percent hit on ad revenues," Jacobson said. "I love Mario, but he's a (B.S.) artist. He calls these things compacts, but a rose by any other name."

>His mission: to redesign with today's readers in mind [St. Petersburg Times]

El Tiempo, Colombia's largest circulation daily, launched a new design Thursday.

Some new pages:

It's a Garcia Media job, with Mario Garcia as chief project leader, along with Rodrigo Fino and Paula Ripoll. El Tiempo's art director is Beiman Pinilla.

Garcia redesigned El Tiempo in 1987, retouched it in 1995 and redesigned it again in 2000.

In 2006, El Tiempo introduces a "rethinking" for a newspaper that has become part of a 24/7 news operation, which includes radio, television, magazines, the Internet and, as of last week, news prompts via mobile telephones.

The new El Tiempo introduces a colorful navigator on page one, along with navigational devices thru every section, including those inside Book 1 and Book 2. A color palette consisting of five main earthtone hues is utilized for secondary readings, informational graphics and backgrounds. Scanners and traditional readers will find the new pages of El Tiempo easy to read, and the content easier to find.

Also, Garcia says, "We have created an entire system of 'secondary readings' for breakout elements to expedite reading. These are what I call internal navigators within stories to lead you into bio sketches, side stories, development of a process, chronology of an event, etc."

Here's one of the design manual's pages regarding "secondary readings."

Full Garcia Media release after the jump.

The folks at MGRedesign have posted a some details on the new agate typography at the Spokesman-Review. And they've posted some feature pages.

Also, some tweaks to the redesign and reader reactions are covered in several of the newspapers weblogs: Daily Briefing, Ask the Editors and News is a Conversation.

Here are some live pages from Monday's redesigned Spokesman-Review, with many thanks to Matt Mansfield.

Earlier
>Spokane's Redesign, Blogged (11/7/05)
>Spokane Redesign, a Sneak Preview (1/29/06)

The other big redesign this weekend was the Orlando Sentinel, which launched Sunday. AME/Visuals Bo Burton kindly sent along some before-and-afters.

Robb Montgomery did a video podcast from the scene with Bo, Stephen Komives and Cassie Armstrong (audio version here). There's also an online guide to the changes.

So here are some pages (new on the right) with some comments by Bo in italics.

Now that we have the speed read on the cover, there's no need for a 3/4 page index inside (it was called "Quick Read." Quick, yeah, right.) So A2 is now the "news lite" page in the paper, balancing out the heavier World & Nation report it faces.

This is my favorite thing about the entire redesign, because its a true new product. Sunday nights are dreadful for local designers (and reporters) because not much live news happens. You end up with lots of feature stories and festival coverage. So we decided that would be a day we throw everything we have at the most complex local story: How growth is changing the region. Crowded roads, crowded schools, disappearing environments, etc. We have a team of visual journalists dedicated to this section, which is planned about 6-8 weeks out.

(Some background on the business redesign here.)

All of our features sections have been completely revamped. While we still have A&E coverage inside every day, the fronts are focused now on specific themes and designed as a magazine in a broadsheet format every day. We also rolled the previously free-standing Sunday Travel section and Wednesday Food section into Good Living on those days.

The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash. (Cowles family, 96,614 daily/124,250 Sunday), launches a redesign tomorrow (they're also narrowing the web width). Here's the full-page guide that ran in today's paper. And Editor Steve Smith wrote a column about it, but if you're not a subscriber, fuggedabout reading it. The consultants on the job, MGRedesign, have been blogging a bit about it, and promise more later. They've posted a draft of the 57-page design style guide (35M pdf), which has page samples from prototypes. I've collected some of them here with some pre-redesign pages to give a peek at what the new paper will look like.

Here's the design philosophy from the style book:

The newspaper industry adopted a new standard size in 2000, and The Spokesman-Review is one of the last major newspapers in the country to convert to the smaller format. In technical terms, it's called a web-width reduction. What that really means is the width of two newspaper pages is 50 inches instead of 55.

The smaller size was first adopted by the industry because it requires less newsprint and so is less expensive. But the format also proved enormously popular with readers because it is easier to handle. We think our readers will appreciate the change.

The smaller size presents both a challenge and an opportunity.

The challenge: Developing a new overall design that will work in the smaller format but still improve overall readability.

The opportunity: Creating a cleaner, easier-to-read newspaper that makes better use of color, graphics, news briefs and alternative storytelling techniques while providing an enormous amount of news and information in the space available.

A design team led by Geoff Pinnock, senior editor for design and presentation, has been at work on the new look for most of 2005. The media consulting firm, MG Redesign, provided assistance. Readers got a hint of things to come earlier this year with upgrades to the 7 section on Friday and the debut of the HOME section.

Now comes the entire newspaper redesign. Think of this book as your guide to our look and feel, and keep these ideas in mind when designing pages:

Simplicity. Use fewer colors, fewer typefaces, fewer secondary photos. Let the content shine through.

Write strong headlines and cutlines. These are the most important words in your newspaper.

Focus on alternative story forms. Ask, "How could we tell this story in a new way?"

Use white space. Let it frame the best story on the page.

For the type geeks, the redesign uses Hoefler & Frere-Jones typefaces Mercury Text (body copy), Guggenheim (headlines, section flags, labeling), Chronicle Display (headlines), Whitney (bylines, cutlines, some headlines) and Whitney Condensed (listings, graphics)

The 7 and Home sections debuted last fall:

Chicago's RedEye made some changes to its design and structure in November, and Design Director Chris Courtney was kind enough to send samples and elaborate.

We had one goal in mind for the redesign when we set out. Get more RedEye into RedEye without necessarily adding more pages.

The publication has evolved quite a bit since its launch back in aught-2. When it started, RedEye was a quick read that gave you just enough info to be dangerous on a range of topics. It had personality and ambition but it hadn't had enough time to grow into anything. Three years later, it's tackling topics others publications have forgotten (i.e. Chicago Rape crisis series; Porch Collapse series, etc.), developing scores of RedEye personalities (i.e. Whizzer, the prognosticating pooch; Kyra Kyles, our local commuting column; Jason Steele, our gay sex columnist, etc.) and introducing Chicago to the Sudoku phenomenon. Not to mention Martin Gee's Sudoku Ninja (stuffed ninjas sold separately)

Some touches of the initial design, created by the uber-talented Mike Kellams, are still evident in the new look. We didn't want to change what RedEye felt like to people. But the original design sometimes held us back from a content perspective. Anyone in the business will tell you that's a bad thing.

So we mocked, fried, dried, stir-fried, deep-fried and broiled down what we had before. We took into careful consideration what we learned from our reader research. Tossed out a fair share of the paper on the bet that our new ideas could beat the old ones. Kicked the tires and set it free. Oh, and I prayed a little.

The process start to finish took three months. We could have made it happen in two.

Now the paper has pacing that didn't exist before, multiple spreads everyday that weren't possible before and more original RedEye content than ever.

The Kane County Chronicle of Geneva, Ill., (Shaw Newspapers, 14,324) redesigned on Jan. 19. (The Chronicle is a sister paper of the recently redesigned Northwest Herald.) Managing Editor Greg Rivara wrote:

In delivering a newspaper worthy of your time, we kept five words in mind:

Smart: The newspaper must challenge us to live better, as well as easier.

Reliable: You will not agree with everything you read. But we cannot give you reason to question if there is a motive behind the words.

Local: There continues to be a place for the Pinewood Derby, as well as that increase in garbage stickers. But local does not end when you cross the county line on your way to work or play. We understand that, too.

Useful: It is not enough for us to report the goings-on at city hall. We also must help with 15-minute meal suggestions, study tips for your 15-year-old, and a restaurant suggestion to help wash away a week of 15-hour days.

Fun: Life is hard. We need to appreciate the small victories. We should do so together.

Typographically, they got rid of Cheltenham, Franklin Gothic, News Gothic and Utopia in favor of Miller Headline, PoynterGothicText and Nimrod.

>Redesign reflects busy lives [Kane County Chronicle]

(Thanks, Renita!)

Four months after The Guardian's relaunch as a Berliner, Business Week weighs in. They are not fans.

The entire newspaper is set in a new font called "Guardian Egyptian." Not quite modern, not quite traditional, it strikes a middle ground between the quaint "Comic Sans" and the uninspiring "Clarendon." The previous graphic incarnation, developed in 1988, was much preferred, it had a certain cutting-edge look and the use of fonts, dividing lines, and pictures made almost any page in the newspaper a well-considered exercise in composition and typography. For the masthead, the italic Garamond font had a human quality and flair, and the extra bold Helvetica was a solid, modern, significant addition. This combination gave the paper and the brand authority, modernity, and a sense of place in the crowded British market.

The Guardian looked like no other newspaper. The traditional serifs and gothic fonts of papers such as the Times and the Telegraph were all remnants of the era of Victorian London, when they began. The Guardian broke this tradition; it made waves in society and gave us beautiful pages to look at. Now, with the uninspiring layouts and dull fonts, the Guardian seems to be saying "I give up, I can't keep up anymore. I need to sit down for a while."

Mario Garcia continues his march around the globe, on Wednesday unveiling the remade Sportstar, an Indian sports weekly published in Chennai by The Hindu. It's been redesigned and converted from a magazine to tabloid format.

N. Ram, the editor in chief, writes:

Our hope is that the radical design transformation, going hand in hand with editorial and production changes, will make your sports weekly more current, more up with the news and trends, more vibrant and varied, more informative and insightful, more fun to read. And it will be quicker to market.

The emphasis of the new design is on elegant, comprehensive, on-the-go packaging and presentation of feature articles and photographs of the highest quality. A new typeface that is young and bold (fonts drawn from the Stainless and Fairplex families), a vibrant architecture, better navigation and layering of stories, a clear and vibrant colour palette, and colour coding of all major sports are key features of the redesign aimed at making Sportstar elegant, exciting, and sportier, besides offering the advertiser better value and new opportunities.

From the Garcia Media news release (full text after the jump):

The Garcia Media team, with Annette Osterwald, from our Hamburg office, as art director, took The Sportstar and helped in its rethinking, working closely with editor Nirmal Shekhar and art director Brian Gaughan.

"The changes involved a total reevaluation of content, with special attention to navigation, and a color palette that is more in harmony with the Indian landscape," Mario Garcia, chief architect of the project said. "Annette and I tried to look at ways in which young sports fan could comb through the new Sportstar faster, guiding them to their favorite sport thru a color coding system."

>Sportstar reinvented [Sportstar]
>Sportstar dons a vibrant new look [The Hindu]

I'm a bit, er, behind on this one, but Italy's largest newspaper, the Milan-based Corriere della Sera (RCS, 664,000), trimmed its size and made design and content refinements on July 20. Gianni Valenti was kind enough to send along details.

The broadsheet shrunk from 38cmx53cm to 35cmx50cm, which is roughly one inch wider and an inch and a half shorter than The New York Times, and is now has a seven-column grid instead of nine. The paper has also added full color (new presses will print color on every page up to 96 pages) and beefed up the page count on inside sections of the paper like Economics, Culture and Sports, giving them their own cover. The back page, traditionally reserved entirely for advertising, now has a "news in two minutes" column, as well as numbers from the major financial markets and promos for the paper's website.

This was an inside job, overseen by editor-in-chief Paolo Mieli and executed by Gianni Valenti, central chief editor, and Gianluigi Colin, art director.

Another RCS daily, La Gazzetta dello Sport (famously printed on pink newsprint) is set to redesign next month.

More pages after the jump.

The team responsible for The Guardian redesign has been nominated for the Designer of the Year, a top British design award. It's the first time an editorial project has been nominated.

Alice Rawsthorn, chair of the jury and director of the Design Museum, which runs the prize, said: "The team behind the Guardian redesign set out to create a model modern newspaper — and they succeeded.

"Unlike some other newspaper format changes, this was not just a shrink-to-fit. Every aspect of the paper was revitalised and reinvented. This is an extraordinarily innovative and intelligent way of addressing the commercial challenges of the newspaper industry."

«snip»

Mark Porter, the Guardian's creative editor, said: "One of the reasons that it is incredibly gratifying to be nominated is that the jury has acknowledged how much of our work is about usability. The most important aspect of the project was making the newspaper easy and enjoyable to read."

He paid tribute to the enormous team effort that had contributed to the redesign, and said he was delighted the Guardian was on such an "interesting and wide-ranging shortlist — part of the point of the award is that it encourages people to realise that design fundamentally affects the world around us".

Here are pages from today's relaunched Observer. You can browse the whole digital version here, and it won't cost you a pound.

Here's the first Berliner Observer front page. More pages tk, I hope.

The Observer blog has a glimpse of the front page of the first edition.

The Observer has a blog up and running chronic(what?)ling its Sunday relaunch as a Berliner. Photos included, such as the one above of Mario Garcia in Consulting Mode.

*Update: The TV ad for the relaunch is here.

Editor and Publisher notes that a crop of newspaper web sites have redesigned recently (including Austin, Houston and the Strib), and E&P's Jay DeFoore wants to know what you think.

E&P has chronicled some of the redesigns in this space, but many others have slipped by without comment. So in order to open a dialogue on the ever-evolving best-practices for news Web sites, we're asking our readers to browse a few of the recent redesigns and e-mail us with your thoughts.

Think of it as a worldwide virtual critique. What works, what doesn't? What could have been done differently, which features are right on the money?

To get you started, check out the links below to some of the most recent redesigns. If there are others out there, feel free to e-mail us with a link and we'll update this article with new URLs. Maybe you frequent a site that needs an updated look and user experience? Nominate it for a mandatory redesign.

We're asking you to send us your comments via e-mail because, quite frankly, we could use a redesign ourselves, as there's no comment function with our existing CMS.

>Announcing E&P's Web Site Redesign Contest [Editor and Publisher]

Related:
>Online Newspapers Are 99% Bad [Andy Rutledge]
>Why Haven't Online Newspapers Gotten it Right? [Kirk McElhearn]

The Observer of London published its last broadsheet Sunday, and in anticipation of its relaunch as a Berliner on Jan. 8, has published a special section.

Editor Roger Alton writes:

We recognise that our readership is changing, and that to meet its new need we have to evolve, too. Size is becoming an increasingly critical factor in people's decisions about which newspaper to read, as the demand for a more efficient and accessible shape grows. For many the traditional Sunday has gone, replaced by a day of activity - whether it be shopping, working, playing sports, travelling or seeing films and visiting museums or galleries.

So the Berliner offers a perfect opportunity for vibrant design combined with an easily handled and convenient shape, easy to navigate and packed with useful information. And readers - advertisers too - used to everything the internet and modern TV technology offers, want much higher standards of presentation, which is why our state-of-the-art printing presses are designed to provide perfect colour throughout the paper, a first on a Sunday.

My team - Rodrigo Fino, Christian Fortanet and Paula Ripoll - put our best effort forward: how can one change a legend? How can one redesign a newspaper that was already quite well designed, thank you?

We started by sitting down and talking to key people at The Observer, to hear their views about the old and new paper. Editor Roger Alton outlined his vision and told us that he wanted the paper to look and feel both 'cultured and vivid'. Armed with his thoughts, we set off to devise a new visual language for the paper.

The Orlando Sentinel is set to launch the first phase of their redesign in late January. They've already revamped their Sunday Business section, and AME/Visuals Bo Burton was kind enough to send along some of those pages (old and new contrasted above), which she says give a glimpse of what's to come:

More local content, more variety in story forms, shorter stories that are more tightly edited, clearer navigation for time-starved readers, and a more vibrant visual identity.

The January launch will include major Page One changes, including an updated Page One nameplate, refocused business sections, overhauled features sections, an new weekly in-depth local section and new section flags. A typographic facelift is coming later in the year.

Here's a glimpse at one of the new flags (adios to that Chicago-Tribune blue!).

London's weekly Observer will roll out its long-awaited redesign and conversion to the Berliner format on Jan. 8, it was announced today.

The new-look Observer will include a full-colour news section and a new, separate listings section to sit alongside the Observer magazine.

"Sundays have changed dramatically over recent years and the Berliner Observer will be the most modern, punchy, engaging Sunday paper, with more variety for the reader, more interactivity with our audience, fantastic use of pictures, a brilliant stable of writers, and the best array of magazines in the market," said the editor, Roger Alton.

The Observer's daily sister paper, The Guardian, relaunched as a Berliner to much fanfare in September. The Guardian's circulation spiked from 340,000 in August to 408,000, but fell to 401,000 in November, prompting some commentators to question whether the £100 million relaunch was wise.

>Observer announces relaunch date [The Guardian]

*Update: Jonathan asks what The Observer looks like now. Something like this:

Scripps' Treasure Coast Newspapers, a group of four dailies in southeastern Florida, redesigned last week (new pages on the right).

The Stuart News, Port St. Lucie News, the Press Journal in Vero Beach, and the Fort Pierce Tribune (combined circ.: 95,000 daily, 107,000 Sunday) merged operations, but each paper will keep its own nameplate and zoned content. The consultant for the job was Creative Circle Media, Bill Ostendorf's shop. For a full report and more page images, go here. Excerpts:

The project involved merging the operations of four papers, standardizing comics and editorial features, adding more color to take advantage of new presses and providing a training program to both raise the level of editing and bring common goals, standards and knowledge to the combined staff. We also helped them analyze and refocus their current and future branding for the individual papers and the group as a whole.

(snip)

Section fronts will use a flexible, page-bottom box to help readers navigate the newspaper with indexing and promos to content inside and upcoming stories. Those same devices will also be used as an opportunity to engage light readers with scannable stand-alone tidbits. Meanwhile, a very flexible set of refers on page one, which can be vertical or horizontal and run above or below the nameplate, will allow editors to give page one a different look each day.

Summary headlines will be used on many section-front stories to help give more information to scanning readers.

(snip)

The papers will share a consistent look unique to that area of Florida. A limited color palette will help with the visual cohesiveness. Two signature colors – Sand and Sky - will have specific functions. Sand will be the background color for layering devices, and Sky is incorporated into navigational elements.

Consistent use of these colors is designed to help light readers quickly find content that's of interest to them.

To create a more modern look, the redesign incorporates fresh typography. New styles of the popular sans Bureau Grotesque are used for lead headlines, page flags, and layering devices. Other headlines are Chronicle Display. These fonts are more efficient, allowing the staff to write more meaningful and conversational headlines. We also used a 15-column grid for editorial content, avoiding the very narrow columns caused by narrower page widths while again giving editors maximum flexibility in page design.

Perhaps these fronts could vary more depending on the local news of the day. Any Treasure Coast-ies care to comment?

They also launched a redesign of their website today, which combines the four newspapers' coverage into one spot, and they launched their own version of the citizen journalism site YourHub.com.

*Update: Jay Small and his band of Scrippsies are responsible for the online redesign.

The Northwest Herald of Crystal Lake, Ill. (Shaw Newspapers, 38,000 daily, 39,700 Sunday), redesigned Thursday.

Editor Chris Krug writes:

The paper should be Smart. Reading the Northwest Herald should help prepare readers for the day ahead and make you more knowledgeable about your community and the world around it.

It must be Reliable. We will continue to provide indispensable, consistent and accurate information that is relevant to readers through an authoritative approach to storytelling.

It must be Local. Life in this region is different from other places around metropolitan Chicago. We know that. And understanding the lives of readers is our business.

It must be Useful. Presenting worthwhile content is vital. This information helps our readers make decisions that affect their lives.

And it should be Fun. Reading the newspaper shouldn't be a spoonful of castor oil.

>Paper only as good as its ties to readers [Northwest Herald]
>Redesign benefits readers [Northwest Herald]

Handelsblatt, a German political and financial daily, introduced a Garcia Media redesign Nov. 21 (new pages on the right), most notably converting the finance section, Finanzeitung, to compact format.

From the press release:

So today Handelsblatt also makes the switch to compact for one of its most important sections. But, overall, readers will find the same quality of financial journalism that has made Handelsblatt the serious, credible newspaper it is. In addition, the new changes are aimed at:

1. Catering to "readers in a hurry," who want the substance of good financial journalism, but served in an easier to assimilate package.

2. Offering distinctive navigational features on page one to guide readers who wish to turn immediately to a specific story, or to the online edition.

It is a winning situation, and it is my belief that traditional readers will find themselves navigating their Handelsblatt quicker. At the same time, new readers will sample the new Handelsblatt and like enough to make it their own newspaper.

Project designers for Garcia Media on this project were Jan Kny and Margit Meister, of the Garcia Media Europe office in Hamburg. Art director for Handelsblatt is Brian O'Connor.

Typographically, they got rid of Corporate and Poynter Old Style Display in favor of Baskerville, Benton Sans, Miller Headline, Retina and Rotis Sans. They kept Trade Gothic, Poynter Old Style Text and Helvetica.

Mexico's Grupo Reforma launched simultaneous redesigns of its three newspapers Sunday, Reforma (Mexico City), El Norte (Monterrey) and Mural (Guadalajara). Garcia Media Latinoamerica's Rodrigo Fino was the project leader, working with Paula Ripoll and Remigio Badano. Also involved were art directors and editors from the papers: Ricardo del Castillo, Reforma; Luz María Díaz de León Reyes, Reforma; Jose Grajeda, El Norte; Fernando Jauregui, Mural and Alejandro Banuet, El Norte. Update: Also, project manager Guillermo Toledo of Grupo Reforma. Apologies, Guillermo!

Fino writes:

But more than just a new aesthetic transformation, the three newspapers followed a meticulous 21-month process to rethink themselves totally, to become a part of a multi-platform environment, amplifying the definition of news. While stating firmly that print is here to stay, the three newspapers have also rethought all processes dealing with navigation, color use, and the methodology of making a reader’s journey thru each page faster and more meaningful.

Typographically,
Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Mercury Display and Mercury Text take over as headline and text faces, respectively, Font Bureau's Dispatch replaces Giza as an accent face, and the sans-serif face used in headlines, cutlines, bylines and such is Vonnes, which Font Bureau developed for Macromedia a while back.

Reforma's nameplate has been tweaked as well.

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.

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

(Thanks to Vanessa Valdes for the images!)

I'm a bit behind on this, but London's Sunday Telegraph redesigned on Nov. 4, most notably ditching the old nameplate in favor of a Bodoni flag which Media Week says is reminiscent of the original 1960s style. The paper also shelved The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, replacing it with Stella, a women's magazine, and Seven, and arts and entertainment section.

Sarah Sands, The Sunday Telegraph's new editor, wrote an editor's note, which appears to be no longer online. BBC's Magazine Monitor summarized the note thusly:

» "I want to encourage intelligent writing, and to present it in an elegant fashion. I suppose you could call it brains and beauty."
» "'Seven' is the highest form of entertainment."
» "Our second magazine is 'Stella'. This is a journalistic spa: beautiful, calm, witty, transforming. If bathrooms have become modern temples, then 'Stella' is the pinnacle of bath time reading."
» "I want the Sunday Telegraph to be like your iPod - full of your favourite things."
» "Some Sunday papers are merely nasty habits. I hope you will buy the Sunday Telegraph because you love it..."

The scamps at Private Eye couldn't resist a send-up:

For me, a Sunday newspaper is like a bath bubble, floating in the air, smelling of perfume, with a picture of a woman in her knickers on the front page. And, just like a bath bubble, it should leave you transformed, fragrant, news-based and waspish. That's why you'll love our new magazine, 'Nutella' - it's creamy, chocolatey and easy to spread on your bread. Not to mention focusing on core news values around the world.

In short, my dream is that the Sunday Gnomegraph is like an iPod - full of old rubbish that you don't want to listen to.

"Papers that don't have to worry about making profits are starting from a different logic.

"If you're doing what's basically vanity publishing, you can do it in whatever shape you like. Commercially it makes sense to be broadsheet. Advertisers don't like tabloids — it is a fashion."

More pages after the jump.

Belgium's Le Soir converted from the Belgian format (about 15"x21") to Berliner and redesigned today (new front on the right). The daily will have three main sections (news/opinion, business/sports and culture/lifestyle) like the redesigned Le Figaro and Le Monde, and will have color on every page.

If you parlez the French, there's a guide to the redesign here and, for today at least, you can download a PDF of today's paper here for free.

*Update: I've learned the consultant on this project was Garcia Media, with Christian Fortanet as the art director.

More pages after the jump.

Le Monde, hoping to regain its title as the most popular newspaper in France, relaunched this week with a new, more modern look (new pages on right, above).

The Guardian writes:

The paper has lost its austere look and unbroken columns of text, which were difficult to read, and adopted an appearance that is airier while still appearing serious.

The most obvious change is the addition of a large colour photograph on the front page. At two columns by six inches, it is still considerably smaller those used by British papers but is a radical step for a paper that did not put pictures on its front page at all until 1972.

The redesign is a Palmer and Watson job. They worked with Matthew Carter to overhaul the typography. He created new versions of his Rocky typeface for headlines. The body copy is Fenway, which Carter created for Sports Illustrated in the late '90s. From the Palmer and Watson press release:

Le Monde's relaunch is intended to widen its appeal among 30 to 40 year olds without undermining its reputation as a deeply serious and authoritative newspaper of record and its unique position within French society. It has long been required reading for French intellectuals and its position of power in French politics is such that ex prime minister Lionel Jospin said: "One cannot govern without Le Monde."

The praise isn't unanimous, however.

Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum for the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, said he noticed a weakness in the redesign. "Le Monde is totally focused on the print edition and it is not related to the online edition, a divide which is really surprising," he said. The paper had not tried systematically to drive readers from its pages to its Web site, he said.

From The Business Online:

In an editorial, Le Monde’s chairman, Jean-Marie Colombani, wrote that the paper’s makeover was a response to a news environment in full revolution, one in which information is fast, free, but confusing. Since its last redesign in 1995, competition had emerged on the net, mobile phones and urban freesheets, forcing Le Monde into transformation and a fresh look, he said.

The paper would have to focus on providing reliable news, Colombani said. It would have to be different, surprising and stimulating. A back-to-basics approach to accurate reporting was needed after the paper’s prestige was damaged a couple of years ago by the highly unflattering book, The Hidden Face of Le Monde. The paper had operating losses of E12m last year and Colombani hopes 2006 will be the recovery year – if it survives that long.

A PDF of the paper's eight-page guide to the new look can be found here. More new pages and the full Palmer and Watson press release after the jump.

The Express-Times of Easton, Pa., (Newhouse, 49,800 daily) debuted a redesign on Saturday. Editor Joseph P. Owens wrote on Sunday:

As we began this process more than 10 months ago, we decided that we were not merely trying to make the paper look different. We used the process to examine how we present information and asked everyone "If you could launch a newspaper from scratch, what would it do for you?" We did not flip a switch and begin something new on Saturday. We've been making changes little by little, coming up with ways to make the paper better as we moved forward.

Our design consultant was Garcia Media, led by world-renowned newspaper designer Mario Garcia. The thrust and execution of the changes came from within. Assistant Managing Editor Tony Rhodin understood the magnitude of the undertaking, having been through it before, and rearranged his life accordingly. He steered, coddled, berated and maneuvered himself and nearly a hundred news and production staff members accordingly. News production editor John Hardick glared into his computer monitor for hours on end, configuring, reconfiguring and just plain trying to figure the whole thing out. He did. And so did his staff.

Some pages:

My friends at mgredesign have a blog that I'm only now finding out about (way to self-promote, guys!). Some stuff there about the in-process redesign of The Spokesman-Review (due in early '06), including a peek at a front-page prototype and the new nameplate, a Jim Parkinson-Matt Mansfield production.

Monty Cook, Baltimore Sun deputy managing editor/presentation & news editing, sends along this update on the Sun's redesign:

In the first two weeks after the launch, The Sun signed up more than 600 new subscribers as a result of a direct mail piece on the redesign to non-subscribers in the area. We are still tracking and hope to reach 1,000 new subscribers by the one-month anniversary of the launch, Oct. 19.

In the month since the launch, we have had 134 cancellations.

Single-copy sales continue to track upward since the launch, between 2 and 4 percent daily year-over-year against projections.

One of our favorite new starts comes by way of a Sept. 21 e-mail from a father named Andrew: "I am impressed. Even my 9-year-old son wants to read the newspaper now. Please sign me up for a subscription!"

Our readers, by a large margin, have not only accepted the design (we took just 1,700 phone calls and emails — positive and negative — in the first month) but are reading more. And as a newspaper, that's all you can hope for in an age where declining readership among the nation's newspapers seems to be expected and accompanies a kind of gloomy pall over the industry. The Sun isn't resigned to that. We're continuing to be aggressive in the way we approach attractinig new readrers through inventive storytelling while continuing to improve the design, editing, writing and coverage of the stories readers want most.

Tim Porter sends along this quote that Steve Yelvington noted at last month's Ifra Newsroom Summit in London:

John Belknap was speaking about newspaper design and quoted a Belfast editor: "If you don't redesign the content when you redesign the newspaper, all you get is a painted cadaver."

Dow Jones & Co. announced today that the main edition of The Wall Street Journal will undergo design and content changes in the next few months and that the paper will convert to a smaller size in 2007.

Some of these enhancements will be introduced over coming months and continue through 2006, culminating in January 2007 with a reformatting of the Journal to a more industry-standard 48-inch web width from its current 60-inch web width. Retrofitting 19 presses in the Journal's 17 print sites to print the new web width will require about 15 months.

The AP reports:

The Journal's editor, Paul Steiger, said in a statement that the design changes would result in having fewer stories "jump" to inside pages; devoting less space to market statistics; including more links to the Journal's online edition, and using more "signposts" to guide readers to stories.

>The Wall Street Journal to Make Series of Innovative Design Enhancements, Cuts Web Width to 48 Inches [Press release]
>Wall Street Journal Trims Down in Redesign [Associated Press]
>Dow Jones Plans a Slimmed-Down Wall Street Journal [The New York Times]

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis on Wednesday will publish an 8-page guide to its Oct. 12 print and online redesigns. You can find the pdf on this slick redesign page, which includes flash video of editors (including deputy managing editor/visuals Monica Moses) talking about the redesign. (Be warned, though, that when you click there, publisher Keith Moyer will immediate start yapping away through your speakers. If there's a stop or mute button, I couldn't find it.)

The page also has a blog and a funny "Q&A" by columnist James Lileks, who in addition to being a fine writer, is very smart about design and how it functions in our lives. (He's designed many of his own books.)

Q. Why? For God's sake, why?

A. Because we can. Because we must! Because enough time has passed that the specter of "New Coke" no longer strangles brave initiatives. Because the people in the design section have thick, detailed dossiers on the private lives of anyone who opposed their mad schemes. Because a few years ago we switched to a new software for writing and laying out the paper, requiring everyone to unlearn everything and master 4,932 counterintuitive steps, and now that we're all comfy with the new system it's time for a fresh steaming batch of HELL; keeps us perky. Because life is about redesign - really, your body is constantly shedding old cells and making new ones, renewing itself daily. Except for bones and warts. You want to get a sack of bones and warts delivered to your door daily? All right, then.

And because we really think you'll like it.

Q. Oh, rah-rah go Strib. How sad. Are you being a total company shill now?

A. Uh - yes. You have found out my terrible secret. I secretly believe that the purpose of the entire project was to come up with a paper universally despised by its customers, so you will all cancel and we go bankrupt and convert the building to condos. Of course we think you'll love it. That's the point.

>Redesign Guide [Star Tribune]

The international editions of the Wall Street Journal on Monday will publish an 8-page special section (pdf) devoted to the Oct. 17 conversion of those editions to tabloid form. The section is, of course, a tabloid.

Publisher Karen Elliott House writes:

We recognize you are busy, mobile executives. This format is not only attractive, but also convenient to carry and to read. It also enables us to deliver more news than we do in our current broadsheet format, in a more tightly organized package.

At the same time, we will integrate this convenient publication with our award-winning Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com, the world's largest paid-circulation news site with 744,000 subscribers around the world, to keep you abreast of business news whenever and wherever you need it. Combined, the two form a powerful, 24/7 tool for business readers.

Our redesigned Wall Street Journal Europe recognizes that. On nearly every print page, you will find pointers to additional news, statistics, photos and even video available online. And online, you will feel instantly at home, with a familiar design and easy-to-use features, including many improvements aimed specifically at readers in Europe and Asia.

Mario Garcia, who led the redesign project, writes:

This renaissance of the tabloid is a story of newspapers transforming themselves to meet rapidly changing needs of readers and advertisers who now easily toggle between a print and online world.

Ironically, it is the advent and acceptance of a new technology — the Internet — that has contributed to this renaissance of an old one — the 400-year-old, smaller-format newspaper.

In a wireless world that is always "on," readers want the portability and convenience of a small format, as well as the online ability to access important information whenever, wherever. Advertisers want new formats, such as those available in compact newspapers, and more efficient ways to reach readers.

There is, however, no evidence that this ad spotted at the Society for News Design conference in Houston this weekend is genuine.

Update: Also, congrats to Mario who, in the midst of all this, ran 4:42 in Sunday's Chicago Marathon. Huzzah!

Correction: Jonathan Hoefler e-mails that Exchange, a Tobias Frere-Jones font, is a new creation: "The Exchange family isn't based on fonts the WSJ currently uses — quite the contrary. Naturally we were given the brief to match or improve the character count of the DowText fonts that the Journal has used for ages, but I think you'll find the new font quite a new font indeed." (Thanks Jonathan!)

Le Figaro, France's largest circulation newspaper, launched a redesign Monday. The newspaper hopes to turn around a circulation decline and solidify its lead over Le Monde, which has lost circulation faster than Le Figaro.

Le Figaro’s managers hope the facelift will attract new, younger readers, especially those in their 40s, executives, and women, who are rare readers of newspapers. The average reader’s age is 55-57.

Under a redesign by Jean Bayle, the paper will have a white title out of a blue masthead signifying its pro-EU ideology; a narrower format, losing 3.4 cm on the width, but retaining the same height; and have three sections, consisting of home and foreign news, the pink coloured business section, and a lifestyle section. The cover price will be held at E1.

Update: Apparently, the economy section is printed on salmon-colored paper. Also, I forgot to note that Le Monde has a Palmer Watson redesign scheduled for next month.

>Le Figaro on top with a new look [The Business Online]
>La nouvelle formule du "Figaro" en trois cahiers veut tenter d'enrayer la baisse des ventes [Le Monde]

Hartford Courant staff writer Joann Klimkiewicz has an interesting piece today on the state of newspapers (erm, not so good) and what they're doing about it. She talked to big-shots like San Jose Mercury News executive editor Susan Goldberg, Minneapolis Star-Tribune deputy managing editor Monica Moses, Baltimore Sun deputy managing editor Monty Cook and consultant Alan Jacobson. And also, God knows why, me. (Thanks, Joann, for not making me sound like the complete rambling jackass I'm sure I sounded like.)

The upshot is, a whole lotta "reinvention" going on.

"Some people get worried when things become very visual," said Monica Moses, deputy managing editor for visuals at The Star Tribune. "But there are some scholars who say ... it just means that people are thinking in a new way - and that's OK. ... Research shows that electronic media have changed the way people want to absorb information. And that requires a rethinking of the newspaper."

But a Paris Hilton image to sell a story? Visual story teasers elbowing important stories off the front page? Do they risk dumbing-down the news?

"I really think what we need to do is give readers a real mix," said Goldberg. "They want to read a really long, beautifully written piece of journalism about an important subject. But other people are going to pick up [the newspaper], and all they have time to do is scan it....

"And we need to do both these things well. I don't believe that providing a quick, informative piece is in any way dumbing down what we do."

Steve Lovelady, one of the "journo-scolds" at CJR, runs down the bad week the newspaper industry had. And at the end of the litany of layoffs and cutbacks, he throws this in:

Almost lost in the news was the discouraging fact that the Baltimore Sun, another Tribune Co. property, announced an over-the-top redesign that left it looking like a comic book and left legions of its readers outraged.

And those "legions" of outraged readers? Would that be the 60ish people who commented on the Sun's redesign blog? (But they'd be different than the "salivating morons" at other blogs, right?) Or the 16 people who cancelled their subscriptions in the first couple of days? (Certainly not the 25 who started subscriptions.) Or the fewer than 1,000 people (out of a readership of well over 600,000) who have called or e-mailed the newspaper with negative and positive comments? Cripes, I've worked at smaller papers that got that many calls because somebody forgot to put the bridge column in. Way to be upfront with the "facts" there, Mr. CJR Man.

>The Week of the Long Knives [CJR Daily]

In a comment to this post on the Baltimore redesign, reader Paul Sullivan wrote that the Mencken Text face looks too much like Monotype's Nimrod. Well, Jean François Porchez, the designer of Mencken, sends along the above comparison of Mencken, Nimrod and New Sun Text (the Sun's previous text face) so Mr. Sullivan "will be able to revise or confirm his comment based on real comparison." Click here for a larger version, or get a PDF here to judge for yourself.

Also, Robb Montgomery has put up a podcast about the redesign with Monty Cook and Lucie Lacava.

The Wall Street Journal has unveiled the new nameplate for the new tabloid Euroopean and Asian editions that debut next month. It reflects the editions' integration with the Journal's online presence.

"The new design combines the powerful brand we are best known for with a subtle statement of our continuous, around-the-clock presence," said Karen Elliott House, senior vice president of Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

The design was conceived by Mario Garcia (above) and executed by Jim Parkinson.

"The nameplate gives us a sense of familiarity with a product," Dr. Garcia said. "The Wall Street Journal's banner has been the 'flag' of the newspaper for more than a century. It stands for all that the newspaper means to its loyal readers: credibility, seriousness, authority, tradition."

... Dr. Garcia said the integration called for a new visual approach. "It was clear in my mind from Day One that fusion of the two media, systematically speaking, meant visual fusion as well," Dr. Garcia said. "When alliances are created, usually one brand wins the brand battle, and the other disappears. In this case, both brands coexist and create the possibility of greater synergy.

"In the end," he said, "if we were to create a real fusion of the Journal's daily practices, that fusion had to start visually."

And, of course, the traditional head cut!

>Journal Redesigns Banner For International Editions [Wall Street Journal]
>Q&A: Mario Garcia Explains Design of the New Nameplate [Wall Street Journal]

Thanks to the estimable Jay Judge, news design director at The Baltimore Sun, we have real, live pages from today's redesigned paper. Also, there's an online reader's guide to the redesign here (or a 10-page PDF here). And there's a QuickTime video of editors (and consultant Lucie Lacava) talking about the redesign here (or the audio version of same in convenient mp3 form here).

Monty Cook, Baltimore Sun deputy managing editor/presentation & news editing and the director of the redesign project, graciously agreed to write a bit about the paper's new design. So, read on.

When the new design for The Baltimore Sun unveils on Monday, September 19, it will be a bold departure — a more vibrant look than any Sun published in its 168-year history. There will be more energy in the design, more color, more reader-friendly navigation, increased interaction and connectivity with newspaper's online site, and a distinctive new typeface.

Tim Franklin arrived as editor of The Sun in January 2004, and out of the many changes he began to make in his first few months came an announcement that he wanted a complete overhaul of the design of the newspaper.

The last redesign of The Sun was Roger Black's successful "retro cool" look that debuted in September 1995, a look that brought The Sun one of SND's "World's Best Designed Newspaper" awards in the late 1990s.

But the newspaper had undergone a 50-inch web width reduction, and as the 1995 design receded from its original mission — the hallmark doglegs began to disappear and modular design was taking hold — it became apparent that a redesign was sorely needed.

In October 2004, The Sun contracted with Lucie Lacava to act as consultant on the project, and it would be produced nearly entirely on-site utilizing The Sun's excellent group of page designers and design managers.

We wanted this to be a company-wide project, not just a newsroom project. We felt that design is most about form and function, not just for readers but for the company that produces it. It has to work on multiple levels simultaneously. So we also needed to assess some of the company's business models, identifying new processes, procedures and, in some cases, technical needs to produce a newspaper in the 21st century.

Baltimore Sun Deputy Managing Editor/Presentation & News Editing Monty Cook was kind enough to send a load of better resolution pages of the redesigned Sun, which hits the streets Monday. More thoughts from Cook later.

More on the Baltimore redesign front: Jean François Porchez designed the fonts for the new Sun. The family is called Mencken (after the famed Baltimore journalist), and Porchez says it's "a sort of contemporary Didot" which moves to something more old-style in its text version and keeps a big x-height on the head version to ensure strong presence in headlines.

>Preview of the new fonts for Baltimore Sun [Chez Porchez]

Wondering what that Sept. 19 Lucie Lacava redesign of the Baltimore Sun might look like? Well, here's a clue from an advertising promotional brochure (PDF) posted on their site. Here's how they're explaining the redesign to advertisers:

Why redesign The Sun?
The Sun’s redesign was undertaken with very clear objectives to enhance the value the newspaper brings to its advertisers and readers.

Redesign Benefits
• A more attractive and energetic look — for instance, more color and eye-catching art above the fold.
• Easier to read, with larger type.
• More useful and helpful to readers.
• Added interactivity and connectivity, such as reporters’ e-mail addresses to encourage reader feedback.
• More sensitive to reader time constraints.
• Additional premium ad positions and ad adjacencies, such as the Traveler’s Forecast map.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch unveils a redesign today. A Q&A that ran last week explained some things.

Why are you redesigning the Post-Dispatch? Didn’t you just redo the paper several years ago — or has it always looked pretty much the same?

The Post-Dispatch was last redesigned in 1997. Over time, we found that format to be constrictive for presenting the news and not especially effective for readers.

Repeatedly, you have told us the P-D looks dense, sometimes difficult to read, cluttered, not particularly appealing or vibrant. Increasingly busy readers want to find what they’re looking for quickly and readily.

Will Page One look different?

Yes, but not radically so. We will have new typefaces, a more direct style for headlines, and a crisper arrangement of stories and visual elements.

Several stories will start on Page One and continue inside the A section, but in weekday editions, these continuations will be grouped together to help you find them easily.

New will be a front-page digest summarizing other main news of the day. And Monday through Friday, Page One will include a "NewsTracker" to help you keep up with ongoing news stories.

Type-wise, they've dumped Dutch 811 and Bodoni and Helvetica and Franklin Gothic and News Gothic (whew!) for various weights of Amplitude, Poynter Old Style Display and Poynter Old Style Text.

You'll be happy to know, however, that the Weatherbird survived just fine.

Update: I should have noted, by the way, that this was a Jeff Glick gig. Also on the Visual Editors home page, Robb has set up one of those funky Zoomify thingies with a bunch of PD pages. Also, he says, a podcast is planned.

Kompas, the largest daily in Indonesia (500,000 daily, 620,000 weekends), redesigned last week (new front page above right). They narrowed the page, restructured the content with emphasis on color and news for younger readers, introduced a separate classified section (the first in Indonesia) and implemented computer-to-plate technology.

This was another Garcia Media gig and was turned around in five months. Mario Garcia was "chief architect" of the project with Jan Kny as art director. At Kompas, the staff included Lukas Widjaja, project director; Hardanto Subagyo, technology; Taufik Hidayat, deputy managing editor and Lim Bun Chai, deputy production manager.

"We started with what I would describe as an elegant and classic look, given to the newspaper by Roger Black, who had redesigned it a few years ago," Garcia said. "Our task was to introduce more modern methods of navigation, create a new color palette and concentrate on new typographic fonts. We also helped with improving the quality and frequency of use of informational graphics."

Some more pages:

Following up on the San Jose changes, here, thanks to Matt Mansfield, are a couple of pages from the new webbified A+E Interactive section.

For PDFs of these pages click here and here.

The San Jose Mercury News is unveiling some tweaks this week, shuffling things around and introducing some new sections.

First, you'll note the rail on the left side of the front page. On Mondays it will be a look ahead at the week, on Tuesday-Saturday, it's the day's major headlines.

Local news, formerly its own section, has been folded into the A-section, starting on A3. And the rest of the section features "better-packaged international news, especially from the Pacific Rim, Mexico and Latin America."

In a web Q&A Monday, Executive Editor Susan Goldberg responded to a reader who didn't like "smashing" the sections together:

We think the newspaper is actually much more clearly laid out than it was before —- more logically and more intuitively. The entire front of the "book" is now local news, and the content telescopes out from there: local, Bay Area, state, national and international (broken out and clearly labeled as world news, Asia news and Latin America news). I guess I don't see that as a "big...undifferentiated heap" but reasonable people can disagree. I hope that after a few days, this new format will feel more comfortable.

Also, a Calendar section debuted today. It is, as you may guess, pretty much just listings of everything from entertainment to sports to car shows.

On Friday comes A+E Interactive, a section that deputy managing editor Matt Mansfield says is "very Silicon Valley in the back and forth function between print and online." And on Sunday new LifeStyle and House+Home (plus signs are high-tech+hip!) sections and a revamped real estate section will debut.

>Monday, reinvented [VisualEditors.com]

The weekend Detroit papers have finally rid themselves of that embarrassing '80s stink, unveiling the new flag (bottom) today. Much better, thanks!

Of course, judging by the various musical clues, we'll all be using Helvetica Black and big blue reverse bars by early 2007. Now where are my Ultravox tapes?

The Detroit News and Free Press, preparing to unwrap their new $177 million presses and convert to a narrower 50-inch web next month, this week introduced some design changes.

Both papers have narrowed the printable area, and the News has gone from a seven-column to a six-column grid. The News has also introduced new typography. Font Bureau's Miller is the new serif face and Titling Gothic as the sans-serif.

Also, Cyrus Highsmith cleaned up the nameplate.

The Freep has developed a condensed version of their Detroit Bodoni Roman, dumped Helvetica and otherwise cleaned up the font selection. They've also revamped the flag furniture and downsized the nameplate.

Best of all, they're finally fixing that weekend combination flag that looks straight outta 1987.

Some readers aren't very happy about the whole thing.

I find the "new look" to be nothing short of annoying and distracting. I ask you to go back to the old format.

Your new format makes it almost impossible to read the paper without special magnifiers. Why would you work so hard to make us not be able to sit down and enjoy your paper?

The Indianapolis Star (Gannett, 254,000 daily/357,000 Sunday) begins a "rolling" redesign today, debuting some new features and typography. Scott Goldman, Assistant Managing Editor/Visuals, writes:

This is the first major step of a "rolling" redesign we'll be implementing over the next few weeks. The end result will be based on three font families, all from Hoefler & Frere-Jones — Gotham, which began its run as our lede headline font today, Chronicle as the serif and our new agate and graphic font, Retina.

The biggest change is what we're calling "J1M" — for "Just 1 Minute" — a bottom strip that's highly visual, loaded with quick-hitting, notebook-type items and made quite an impact with our readers group earlier this year. The J1Ms run on Metro, Sports, Business and Living every day, and will reduce us to four-story maximums on our covers and more often, 3-story covers.

Here are some new pages with old ones (on the left) for comparison.

Here's a closer look at a couple of those "J1M's":

The images of the new pages and other info was provided by Mr. Tim Ball, to whom many thanks are due, as are congratulations on his recent promotion to news design director. w00t!

The Record of Stockton, Calif., (Dow Jones, 60,000 daily circ.) launched a redesign on Sunday. It's a Garcia Media joint, headed by Mario Garcia and Garcia Media Creative Director Kelly Frankeny with Record Presentation Editor Ryan Becker.

The new design sports a "3-Minute Record," visual briefs, color navigation, layered information and new typography. The face for headlines, decks and flags is Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Chronicle Display with Knockout for graphics, navigation, agate, etc. Body copy is Font Bureau's Poynter Old Style Text.

The new, modernized flag is based on Chronicle, and is, they say, "wine" colored. Whether it's a Cabernet or Merlot or what is unclear. Maybe a nice Chianti.

Garcia said in a press release:

"We always take great pleasure in the rethinking of regional newspapers like the Record. Readers of these papers appreciate all that goes into them, read them from cover to cover, and bring a sense of community and belonging that sometimes is not there in the larger metropolitan dailies."

The New York Times reports today that Barron's, the weekly newsprint financial magazine, will introduce a redesign on May 16. The goal is to help the publication's 300,000 subscribers navigate more quickly through the content.

For help in engineering the quicker read, Barron's turned to Milton Glaser and Walter Bernard, who oversaw the magazine's last redesign in 1994. They reduced the magazine to two sections, shortened the stories, ran text down the middle of the page and surrounded it with bits of information: a summary of the story at the top, a chart or graph, and a box called "The Bottom Line" with a one- or two-sentence synopsis. They also added more white space, a phrase that Mr. Glaser said made editors and writers nervous because "they think they have been displaced by nothing."

The result looks something like a Web page. But the designers said that was not their goal.

"Were we thinking of the Internet? No," said Mr. Bernard, who is 67 (Mr. Glaser is 75). "We were just looking for clarity."

The Hindu, a 125-year-old, 1 million circulation daily in Chennai (Madras), India, unveiled a redesign (above right) today. N. Ram, editor-in-chief, writes in a front-page note:

A newspaper of record, a serious, quality daily offering a variety of news, features, analysis, and comment, wedded to the classical 'core' values of journalism: truth-telling, freedom and independence, justice, comprehensiveness, reliability, and social responsibility. But a newspaper committed to being contemporary in all aspects, including design. Among other things, this means being engaging and lively; responding to the changing interests and tastes of a growingly diverse 'interlocking public'; taking visual journalism to enhanced levels; seizing the exciting opportunities India, the world, and the local community offer a contemporary newspaper; and being systematic, put-together, and disciplined about all this.

'Contemporary-Classical,' this is how we see our place under the sun. And this is how we wish to be read and assessed by our three million readers, a growing proportion of them young men and women.

Garcia writes:

The purpose of this redesign is to offer a more contemporary, elegant, and functional newspaper: by giving pre-eminence to text, including (where appropriate and necessary) long text, but also by enabling photographs, other graphics, and white space to have an enhanced role on the pages; by giving the reader more legible typography, an efficient indexing or 'navigation' system, a clear hierarchy of stories, a new and sophisticated color palette; and by offering the advertiser better value and new opportunities.

The challenge when redesigning a classic, elegant, and traditional newspaper such as The Hindu is to make sure that one improves a good product, attracts younger readers, but does not take away all the wonderful attributes that have made this newspaper the icon it is within Indian journalism.

The typography is various weights of Interstate and Chronicle. More page images after the jump.

>Introducing our new look newspaper [The Hindu]

The Bermuda Sun of Hamilton, Bermuda, introduced a redesign on Friday. The Sun's staff was helped by Bill Ostendorf's Creative Circle Media Consulting (Note to self: Consider career, latitude adjustment). A report on the project, and more before-and-after images, is here. Questions about margarita allowances and extensive "research" trips remain unanswered. As for the typography:

Nimrod text type is dramatically bigger looking than their old one (Times). It is also more efficient and saves space. Gotham Condensed was selected as the primary headline font to give editors better counts on headlines than the Interstate they had used before. We recycled Interstate,� using it for nameplates and page flags, and introduced Poynter Display to give the paper some serif display type for contrast.

>Bermuda Sun [Creative Circle Media Consulting]

The LA Times' Sunday Opinion section has been trying some bold things lately. The section covers of Jan. 16, 23 and 30 all featured full-page cartoons by JibJab, Mark Alan Stamaty and Roman Genn. The Feb. 6 cover scales it back a bit, but still features a sizeable strip by Stan Mack.

On Jan. 30, after the third straight full-page illo, former Timesman Kevin Roderick wrote:

Looks like the full-page JibJab cartoon on the front of the LAT's Opinion section two Sundays ago wasn't the bold stroke and clever visual play it seemed. Turns out it was just the beginning of another (yawn) predictable design format. Today's cartoon by Roman Genn is fine as a work, but the conceit of devoting the entire front page to a one-note illustration feels tired after three straight weeks. Now that I expect it, the splash of color doesn't pull me into Opinion. Instead, it telegraphs nothing new here. It smacks of space filler, like the giant photos in Outdoors, and that's bad in a section that is supposed to lure you with the allure of its ideas.

Instead of coining a new design cliche, why not pick their spots and surprise readers with a really good cartoon or illustration a few times a year? If they must do a giant cartoon every week, and won't move it to the back page, at least shrink it to a half-page. It would still be the largest graphic in the paper all week, but then the editors could really have fun on the cover with catchier headlines, teasers, other graphic devices�maybe even, you know, a particularly smart thought or idea piece.

LAT Deputy Managing Editor Joe Hutchinson says of the changes:

The Opinion section at the Los Angeles Times is going through a metamorphosis of sorts. The past three weeks we used a single illustration as the entire cover - but this is not something we're going to do every week from now on. It's part of the experimentation process leading up to a redesign and rethinking of that particular section. The different approach has given us an opportunity to try something completely different and gauge reactions by our readers and our staff. We will continue to work on creative and inventive ways to get our readers thinking and talking, since inspiring thought is really one of the things an opinion section should do.

The Times has run four letters on the section that I can find online, all negative, like this one.

In the Jan. 23 edition, I count almost one-third of the section constituted of cartoons. I like to read the funnies about as much as most people, and I think Michael Ramirez's offerings are great. But I don't read Opinion to read cartoons. You are diluting your otherwise sober and valued presentation by putting half-page, let alone full-page, cartoons in the section.

(Thanks to Michael Whitley for page images, etc.)

The Reno Gazette-Journal (Gannett, 66,400 daily) launched a redesign last week, the first one in 15 years.

The redesign project was launched by the Gazette-Journal�s news staff nearly two years ago. An internal redesign committee consulted with a variety of national design experts, studied the design of many leading national newspapers and magazines and met repeatedly with local readers in an effort to refine the look of the paper.

Internal �prototype� pages underwent dozens of alterations before the basic structure of what you see today was presented to various groups of readers, including longtime subscribers and recent newcomers to Northern Nevada.

�The readers who came in and reviewed the pages were essential to the process,� said Jim Sloan, a senior editor for projects in the newsroom. �If they didn�t like something, they told us.

�But they liked these pages. They said they felt like they were reading a more relaxed, more informative newspaper.�

Guidance from readers led to several key changes to the newspaper � including the decision to compile all local news in the A section and launch the new Nation & World section, Sloan said.

The new design will emphasize local news on page 1 but also allows news editors to fully explore world events � both on the front page and in the Nation & World section. New �above-the-flag� features at the top of the front page will alert readers to special stories inside the paper, and on the weather page there is a new guide that will alert readers to stories scheduled to appear in the next few days.

>Major redesign goes hand in hand with updated Web site [Reno Gazette-Journal]

(Thanks, tball!)

The ever-prolific Norfolker (Norfolkie?) Charles Apple, cut off from his life-giving access to VisualEditors.com, informs us that the Toronto Star is set to launch a redesign on Sunday. From a statement released today:

Toronto readers will wake up to a bright, bold new Star this Sunday, Jan. 16, as the Toronto Star launches a newspaper unlike any other.

Bold, lively and full of colour, the magazine-style broadsheet offers everything a Sunday paper should be, and readers have said they want: good reads, engaging columnists, thought-provoking ideas, lots of sports, entertainment, and, of course, breaking news.

The striking visual package makes bold use of photography, graphics and typography throughout the paper's four sections: A-section, O.T. (sports), The Buzz (lifestyle and entertainment), and Ideas.

The paper was designed around the premise that people have more time to read on Sundays and therefore, expect more from their newspaper. Sunday provides not only the immediate news of the day but features that readers can enjoy in a more leisurely way.

...Editor-in-Chief Giles Gherson [said] "We believe that this will be the first major North American newspaper with colour on every page."

Check back here Saturday night. I should have some page images up.

*Update: David Putney says it's "Norfolkian." Of course!

>Bold new Sunday newspaper makes its debut [Toronto Star]

The Bradenton (Fla.) Herald (Knight-Ridder, 42,280 daily) has redesigned. Only this squib online at the moment and no visuals. The big change seems to be that they've dumped "Bradenton" from the name and are now just "The Herald."

We believe the simplified name is a better fit for Manatee County's dominant daily newspaper in the 21st century - a paper that serves all sections of the community.

>Back to our roots [The Herald]

The Startlegram's new one-jump Sunday A1 is on the streets of Fort Worth today. And here it is, courtesy of Star-Telegram Sunday coordinator Kate Gorman. An old Sunday cover is on the left. The new no-jump Monday A1 that had some people all a-twitter a few weeks back comes tomorrow.