Charles Apple

The Dallas Morning News freshened its design today (Tuesday) as it switched to a narrow format.

DMN Presentation Director Rob Schneider took a few minutes to walk us through the changes:

So we are finally making the switch to a 48-inch web width and made design changes at the same time. Not a redesign by any means. Much more of a cleanup with a couple of major changes.

We looked at the changes as a opportunity to take stock of everything, fix what didn’t work and keep what did.

The principle goal of these design changes is to make the paper easier to read. Everything — from our body and agate type to the fonts we used in our headlines to way we space and label our stories — was built from that premise.

The most distinctive change is an easier to read body type. We kept the same font, but adjusted the size and leading.

Heh. Always a good thing. I’m constantly amazed at how many papers still try to shrink their body type. Our core readers hate that.

Page one, before-and-after:

The first thing that strikes you is that the new page is much, much cleaner. That’s really important in these new, reduced-width formats. The temptation is to squeeze everything you’ve had above the fold into your new, smaller space.

And, as you know, less can often be better. Especially if you’re cultivating a sophisticated look.

Even the new rail looks much cleaner, minus the tint.

Rob continues:

In order to make things easier to find, we wanted our covers and inside pages to achieve a sense of clarity they were missing before. And so we improved the spacing and separation between all of our elements — from gutters on up to the space between our section flags and the rest of the page. If we added one color to our palette, we wanted it to be white. We also added relentless labeling to all of our stories and pages.

The DMN certainly pulled off the “white” thing. You can see right away, in these samples, that the paper is using a lot more white space. Very clean. And losing the rail on the metro front means Rob can run his photos much bigger. Note the impact his new page has. Even with lede art that contains no people — or cute puppies — the new page has a lot more impact.

Wow; you can really tell the difference in the page widths by looking at the two, um, eye-catching ads at the bottom of the before-and-after sports fronts, above.

I wonder if papers are charging less for smaller section-front ads in the 48-inch web width. Hmm.

The new, color-coded section headers are very spiffy. Seems like several papers, lately, have gone back to the color-coding thing. Perhaps its come back into style, finally.

Rob, again:

We wanted to use color specifically for navigational purposes but had one big change that came about from our reader research.

In our initial concepts we were restrained in our color approach to our
section flags, really for pure design reasons. In our research, though, we
gave readers options that used much more aggressive navigational color and they loved it — at a clip of almost 95%.

It’s certainly the biggest change we’ve made and I expect to get crap from some brothers in design, but it’s hard to argue with the logic from a navigational perspective, and it’s obviously not a new concept either. It’s just new for us. Obviously, it creates a big difference on our section covers though.

I love ‘em. The font is wonderful and the colors work well — especially in this new, cleaner environment you’ve created for them. I agree that the biggest complaints may come from other designers who may claim you’re “looking too much like USA Today.”

Heh. Have you seen their circulation figures lately? Bring it on.

And besides: You were already doing the color-coding thing. You just strengthened it.

Rob addresses the font:

The font is Gotham, we used it for our labeling all the way up and down the hierarchy (from bylines to labels to section flags and everything in

between.

A few more section fronts:

Rob concludes:

In the end, it will be a living, breathing thing for us. An evolving process that we will continue to improve on.

This process has taken the better part of a year — all while we’ve been
doing our normal jobs as well. A great deal of the help came from Marilyn Bishkin, Sergio Pecanha, Chuck Stewart and Jason Dugger as well as CCI gurus Heather Germany, Tracey Thompson and Kristin Waidler.

Looks like a very successful “minor design tweak” that makes a major visual impact: Not only do these new color headers sing, but the cleaner type and the white space make for a more sophisticated look.

Not bad at all, Rob. We’ll be curious to see how readers respond. You, uh, didn’t screw with the crossword or anything, did you?

For larger looks at the new pages, click on the thumbnails.

Top row: A1, Metro, Sports, Biz and GuideLive fronts:

Bottom row: Healthy Living front, celebrity page, Weather and two inside news pages.

Thanks a bunch, Rob, for sharing with us. Congratulations on a successful launch!

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If you’d like to get an upclose look at the new-and-improved Dallas Morning News, why not take a road trip and pick up a copy yourself? I think April 16 sounds like a great day for a trip to Dallas.

While you’re in town, of course, you could spend a few hours absorbing The Art of Being Brilliant at the Belo building, at the SNPA Traveling Workshop.

It’s free, so the price is right. Read more about it here.

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