More about St. Paul’s redesign
Ben Ramsden of the St. Paul Pioneer Press has blogged all about the redesign his paper unveiled today.Despite this, he took the time to tell us all about it. And then, because of technical issues, I couldn’t post it until now. My apologies.
Ben writes:
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 for focus groups, market tests, 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 really liked the direction we were going.
…I have to admit, we tried to give each section its own identity without being too inconsistent. I think it will work (cross your fingers). We kept our body type font the same in every way, including keeping it the same size and on our grid.
Monday’s and Tuesday’s fronts, compared.
—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.
We wanted to be different enough from the competition without losing our identity. So we darkened 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:
—
Local section, before and after:
Inside local pages, before and after:
Business front, before and after:
Sports front, before and after:
Daily Life section, before and after:
About those new fonts, Ben writes:
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 a sans-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. It was a nice balance to Verlag.
[EDIT: I had posted a sample of Mercury here, but Ben says it wasn't the same font. "The Mercury we use is the same display serif font as the Arizona Republic," he says.]ÂÂ
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 created by Mark Simonson, the brother of one of our feature designers. It is more for the features page:
Ben adds they obtained all the fronts from The Font Bureau.
Here are slightly larger looks at the new pages. As always, click on the thumbnail:
Check out more details to come about the project in Ben Ramsden’s blog.
Also, read our earlier post on this topic.