More on the redesign

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.