While scrolling through my favorite movie site online, I came across something kinda cool. You can see four pages of The Gotham Times.
This is part of a viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight. The sequel to Batman Begins. Kinda cool.
Didn’t Superman Returns do the same thing with the Daily Planet?
Wow, there is a bug going around the Twin Cities, and I got hit hard by the germs. I still have a cough, and I have no voice, but the fever has gone down. I’m finally back to work.
While I was at home nursing myself back to health, I really enjoyed reading and looking at the Pioneer Press. It was a good reminder of the talent we have in this newsroom. What makes me happy is the strong working relationship the reporters and graphic artists and designers have with one another. This was evident in Monday’s front page.
Reporter Doug Belden and graphic artist Steve Thomas came up with this fun alternative story form about a middle school English class that teaches how to create a graphic novel.
Steve tells us how the idea went down:
The writer, Doug Belden, came to me with a story he was working on about a local middle school that offered an elective course on graphic novels. His idea was to do the story as a graphic novel. I was immediately interested and accompanied him to the school for further interviews with some of the students. After seeing what graphic novels they were reading in class (and at home on their own) it became clear that the majority of it was manga or similar style art. Manga is the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons*. Manga as a term outside of Japan refers specifically to comics originally published in Japan*. The style of art is unmistakable, with characters who (usually) have large eyes and small noses and mouths (I’m no expert on the subject so an internet search on manga might get you a clearer definition.) I decided to try to mimic that style in this project considering that’s what most of the kids were reading.
As far as putting it all together, Doug sent me the text to go through and pick what I thought was important. I also had to consider what would work as a ’script’ for the graphic novel. This, along with sketching out panels and characters, eventually lead to the final product. It all came together fairly easily, or maybe it just felt that way because it was a fun project to work on.
I just wrote this to Charles Apple, explaining more on the redesign….
About six months ago, we were told that we were going to go to a 46-inch Web, and that this was an opportunity to modernize our look. So design editor Lauri Hopple, myself, Amanda Willis, Nosh Numar, Ellen Thompson and the rest of our design team planned out a redesign in six months. YIKES!!!!!
This was totally in house. We had no time to do focus groups, market test, surveys and everything else you might expect in a redesign. Moreover, it was really Lauri’s vision and execution that made this happen. The only time we knew we were on the right track was when Media News Group chair Dean Singleton visited the Pioneer Press and loved the direction we were going.
The biggest change, beside the 46-inch web was the change in fonts. For the longest time, we used the Worldwide family. We saw a trend that papers were going back to the san-serif typeface as their primary headline font. After looking through some families, we really liked the Verlag family. It had a lot of options. There was some debate if we should have a serif font, and after some discussion, we went with the Mercury font for centerpieces that warrant a more featury headline.
We use two other new fonts. Stainless is our font for breakouts and cutlines. Also, we gave it to sports as their headline font. It’s pretty sharp and a more masculine font. What’s really cool is that it looks great in italics, which we will be doing more of.
The other is Coquette, a font that one of our feature designers brother created. It is more for the features page.
I have to admit, we tried to give each section its own identity without being too inconsistent. Finally, we kept our body type font the same in everyway. Including keeping it the same size and on our grid.
We also tinkered with our 1A and section flags. The key there was to simplify them. Because we zone, we wanted to bring out more of the zone in the masthead, and we made the flags shallower. The key was to be different enough from the competition without losing our identity. So we darken the nameplate and pushed it to the right. We used this consistency throughout the paper. So in our local section, we placed the zone on the left side and reversed type “Local News” on the right in a blue plate. In fact, we pulled off a Gannett-USA Today with color-coding our section fronts. Blue for local, red for sports, green for business and teal for feature pages.
Again, I will be posting some other ideas and thoughts on my blog once I get into work. I will be showing some of our pages as well.
I hope this works.
The fast-acting staff at the Pioneer Press launched its redesign this morning. With about a six-month time frame, design editor Lauri Hopple, Amanda Willis and a team of others (including myself) made some changes. Please check it out at newsuem.com.
Please note that I will update my blog later today to show you the complete redesign.
Here’s what Pioneer Press Executive Editor Thom Fladung said about the redesign on today’s 1A. It pretty much sums up the goal.
The Pioneer Press we printed today is different in a couple of ways. And, depending on the edition you got, it may be changing further in the next few days. Some explanation:
– The paper is narrower. You’re not imagining it. We’ve changed to a page width that is becoming the newspaper industry standard, allowing us to use less paper.
– Some of you may have a paper that’s the same width as before, but with narrower stories. We had to make this conversion one printing press at a time. So, some people today will get newspapers on the old, wider paper. By Wednesday, we expect all papers to be in the new size.
– The paper looks different. Along with reducing its width, we took the opportunity to improve the look of the Pioneer Press and make it easier to use. So, for example, each section is now color-coded. We’ve anchored the popular shorter news stories from the many communities we cover on Page 2 of the Local section. We made the crossword puzzle on our comics pages bigger. And we’ve made various other changes to enhance readability.
We also didn’t change a lot of your paper:
– The size and typeface of the text did not change.
– The amount of space for stories, photos and other art is not changing. The pages got narrower, but by redesigning the page headings and making other adjustments, we were able to retain virtually all the news space we had in the wider version.
– Your favorite features are in the usual places. We didn’t move them around.
– We have the same number of channels and the same organization for our weekly TV section and the daily TV listings.
Most important, our commitment to intensely reported news from your communities and about your issues has not changed. We hope you’ll find the new look of the Pioneer Press to be fresh yet familiar. Please leave a comment below or call me at 651-228-5487.
— Thom Fladung, editor
Later today, I will post all section fronts and some examples of inside pages. As some of you may know, it’s hard to launch a redesign and mistakes are made. But as we get use to the new look with new styles, it’s only going to get better.
I will try to explain the process of how and why we made the decisions we made. This redesign was done on the fly. We didn’t have a lot of time to do focus groups and press tests. This was a fast push to modernize the Pioneer Press without completely reinventing it. So please stay tuned throughout the weeks and months as I share some of the successes and struggles we have with the Pioneer Press redesign.
In the meantime, please feel free to read some of the comments the Pioneer Press readers are saying. It should be noted that you may have to sign in at twincities.com to keep reading. Like all redesigns, most people who commented, don’t like it.
Starting Tuesday, the face of one of the leading Twin Cities media outlets will be getting a face lift. It’s going to be noticeable, but not dramatic. It’s going to be exciting, and I hope people are ready for it and not shocked.
Keep coming to this blog in the weeks to come and find out who I’m talking about. Also I will evaluate the new look and give you a behind-the-scenes look.
O.K. Let try this again. A while back, I started a blog, but never really kept it going.
Well, I’m back.
This time around, I’m going to try and keep this blog professional and try to comment on what interests me in the world of visual journalism. I’m going to try and keep it local, looking at the newspaper I work for and the competitions.
I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say about it. It might just be me commenting on how stories are played differently, or something that is completely random. I just don’t know.
I will also try to change to look of the blog as I get more involved and educated on how to run this.
So if there’s anyone out there, be patient.
Thanks.
-b
