An in-depth look at the new Hartford Courant redesign
Melanie Shaffer, design director of the Hartford Courant, sent us a big batch of PDFs this afternoon of her paper’s new redesign.
She writes:
It’s been a wild week. I don’t think anyone can be fully prepared to launch a redesign in just about 14 weeks.
We had a great centerpiece all set to go for the launch, then Paul Newman passed away. He’s a long-time Connecticut resident so we new we had to do it right. We had also known he was ill, so we were prepared for his passing, however that was in the old design style.
I had two designers working exclusively on this redesign with me, Chris Moore, my deputy design director and Tim Reck, my lead features designer who is a stickler for details. None of this would have happened if these two hadn’t worked their tails off.
The rest of my teeny staff of graphic artists and designers (nine in all, including me) took on the extra work and plowed through the daily grind all summer long.
Melanie Shaffer in a local Fox News TV report on Friday.
—
Oh, and thanks for the dorky quote off the TV spot. The pressure of the video camera turned me into a bumbling idiot.
Ah, I don’t think Mel looked like a bumbling idiot at all! I’ve been on TV before and it is indeed unnerving.
I’m quite pleased with the redesign, though. I was awfully worried about this one. Like many of us, I’ve long been a fan of the cleanly-designed Hartford Courant. I didn’t want to see that spoiled.
And it wasn’t spoiled. The new design is punchier, but still very clean; very classy.
We posted it this morning. But here, again, is the new page one:
Melanie wrote a bit about the new nameplate:
When our staff and newshole reductions were announced in June, we knew that the content that couldn’t continue on in print had to move online. We also knew there needed to be a cycle of the newspaper feeding the web and the web feeding the newspaper. Topics start in the paper, they move online for the public to comment, then that conversation moves back into print.
With that thinking, my objectives were to blend Hartford Courant and courant.com in the masthead.
We wanted to be unique and clever in this design. We always had the dot at the end of the our masthead. We used that dot to add the dot-com. Many, many many variations of working that into the masthead exist. This vertical masthead retained the traditional script of the Hartford Courant, which was very important to me, and blended it with both the .com message and the new font we brought into this redesign.
We turned the corner, if you will. This masthead was literally worked to death with details up until last Tuesday.
I think the vertical masthead puts more emphasis on the design, especially the centerpiece package. We are also bringing illustration onto the front page for the first time. Traditionally, we have only used graphics and photography. We have always been a paper with an artistic bent and will continue to honor our strong photojournalism. With this redesign, I wanted to incorporate illustration into the options in a smart, sophisticated edgy way. You’ll see some of that in the coming days/weeks.
This new masthead moves us out of the traditional newspaper approach of lede-story. Newspapers haven’t been breaking news vehicles for a few years now. We’ve been second-day focused, but haven’t released ourselves from the tradition of the strong right-hand lede.
Going forward, we are focusing on the best news story of the day as both the lede and the centerpiece. We’ve shifted our lede A1 designer to an earlier start to plan and work the visuals. Of course, if important breaking news happens on our news cycle, it will still be featured prominently on our front page.
—
Sports remains a freestanding section. The daily sports section will have classifieds folded into the back:
A closer look:
Melanie writes:
With the .com objective on the front page, we had to continue that onto the inside section fronts and also create simpler navigation for our readers. Our web refers take our readers all over the place with unique redirects. Now, each section front has courant.com worked into the page banners. So for stories within that section, a reader can go online using the section’s redirect and find those stories on that splash page (courant.com/CTLiving for instance). Our Deputy Online Editor worked out the details of renaming the online sections to better mirror the paper’s sections.
We also started something called ReaderSpeak. These reader quotes are featured prominently in the banners of the sections and throughout the paper. We are bringing the conversation from online back into print. Readers can comment on a story today and have their timely comment featured in print the next day.
Our research shows that more than 50% of our print readers are also online.
My managing editor, Bobbie Roessner, also thought it was important to incorporate our strong Connecticut focus into the naming of sections. That is why you’ll see a CT in front of each section. We are still Connecticut’s largest news gathering organization. This naming was also mirrored online.
The daily edition folds Connecticut news and business news into the front of the A section followed by a new Nation/World spread and then the old editorial pages, now renamed CTOpinion.
Local, biz and editorial remain freestanding in the Sunday paper. Mel writes:
We took all our newshole reduction out of the daily so we could maintain the Sunday paper. Research suggests our readers spend upwards of 4 hours on the Sunday paper. That time commitment is considerably less during the week.
—
The Sunday Connecticut section is now CTWeek:
—
Sunday Consumer is now CTConsumer:
—
The Sunday Commentary section is now CTOpinion:
—
The Sunday Arts section is now called CTArts. Mel writes:
Yeah, we know it reads c-tarts without the color distinction.
—
Mel says the CTLiving section is a freestanding section seven days a week…
…though with considerably fewer pages and with obits and the weather page at the end of the section.
The Sunday travel page — formerly called Journeys — is now the Sunday CTLiving page:
—
Melanie writes:
The Home & Real Estate name stays the same, though our Friday broadsheet section is called CTHome:
—
And there you have it: The new Hartford Courant.
Many thanks to Melanie for taking the time to show us around!
September 29th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Just wondering .. . does Hartford have a weekend entertainment section or tab? I’d really like to see that.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Certainly smarter, sharper typography. GREAT use of illustrations, photo-illustrations and documentary photos — but the Courant always got that stuff right. I don’t see one thing in there that would qualify as an infographic, though, mirroring some of what I understand Roger Black and Dona Wong discussed at SND Vegas. Has the infographics ship sailed, Charles? If it has — I’d say it’s done so prematurely.
September 30th, 2008 at 12:12 am
The best part of this design? Of all the big ambitious things, it’s by far the “Reader speak.” It’s genuine proof that they GET it regarding print and online having to work together.
That’s the very type of feature I want to see more papers integrate.
September 30th, 2008 at 8:36 am
I understand their aim with a new nameplate and renamed sections, but I have to think there could be far more elegant solutions than tacking on “.com” like that and adding “CT” in front of everything.
September 30th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
The redesign doesn’t stray too far from the Courant’s winning formula, but I will miss the elegance of the old design. There seems to be some schizophrenia going on regarding columns — why are some shaded and others aren’t? Why, if you have two columns on one page, is one shaded but not the other?
This design likely will hold up better than the other Trib redesigns, though. After Orlando’s big splash, there seems to have been a racheting down of sorts, especially regarding turning more stories into charticles.
October 1st, 2008 at 11:40 pm
I”ve been a reader of the Courant for decades. I worked at the Courant for 11 years and went through a redesign. This redesign is really a tough one. Honestly, it’s a mess. It’s simply hard to read / use. The eye just tends to bounce all over the place - it kind of makes me queasy. The daily paper uses a sepia tone for the CT’s, and, with that font, it looks like it should have old cowboy photos. The most organized elements of the paper are now the ads. I appreciate the work that went into it and I am very loyal to the Courant, but this redesign is a miss.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I am not too pleased with this new format. I waas especially annoyed with the Living Online which gave me a website to look at if I wanted to read certain stories. Why bother to subscribe to the paper if I can do this? I find it annoying and a pain the the posterior.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Being from Australia, I’ve never seen this paper before. That being said the redesign looks like a winner to me. I’ve worked as a designer on papers before and I think that with a couple of weeks adjustment this will be seen as a winner.
It looks like the word count will be down slightly, but it is good to see a little breathing room on some pages. The negative space that has been left highlights the headlines better.
My only beef is with the .com tacked onto the vertical masthead.
December 26th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
I love newspapers. I subscribe to the Courant and two other papers, delivered each morning and have for years. I understand many papers are in serious financial trouble, including the Courant. I predict the new design will not attract new customers and will drive away the rest. The new design is disorderly, unbalanced, and lacks harmony. It creates in the reader tension, frustration,
confusion, and makes the reader want to put the paper down and never read it again.
The new Courant has lost sight of one fundamental fact:
A newspaper is supposed to be read and enjoyed. I used to look forward opening the Courant each morning. I now dread it. There is no enjoyment and it cannot be read. The vertical “masthead” is out of place and
the letters are sideways and unreadable. It wastes prime real estate that should be used to advantage. It reminds me of seeing a crooked picture on a wall - you want to walk over and straighten it. Calling it a .com is false. It is a newspaper, not a web site. The “masthead” is now just a design of a bird - no words.
It is neither cute nor clever - it is upsetting and out of place.
The front page is divided into horizontal thirds,
so the important news, upper right hand headline, has disappeared. So we
can’t tell what important news has happened. The front page is now relegated to the many ways our fellow humans can suffer. When Senator Obama won the election, I half-expected it to be buried on some inside page, so conditioned I had become with not knowing where to look for national news. Where the design goes beyond infuriating is where it uses different type faces in a pull-quote, starting it in large print and then diminishing the print half-way through. This is akin to like installing speed bumps on Interstate 91. The mind can’t read the quote, and must stop, re-start and stop again. I can no longer sight read section headings. They are preceded by letters “CT” and form no words. “CTLIVING” and “CTSPORTS” are not words, and I cannot grasp them without stopping to figure out where the space is supposed to be. Printing “CT” in a different color doesn’t help. To make it worse, the words use fat print, which my mind is unused to seeing and cannot grasp without slowing down.
I have reluctantly concluded that it is simply too taxing to locate information, too difficult to read the type face, and too upsetting to locate information, and too disorienting to try to read it. The new design is profoundly disrespectful of the newspaper traditions. What they took away was the balance, order and
harmony of the old format, and substituted a mishmash of form, color, type faces, pictures, non-words.
The eye and mind cannot focus.
Rather than looking forward to opening the morning paper, I look forward to January 5, when my subscription expires after more than 30 years. It will not be renewed.
January 5th, 2009 at 10:15 am
As a closet writer, I am ready to come out and display my work. This morning I decided that I need a vehicle to introduce me to readers.
I decided the Hartford Couraant would be a great vehicle for this after I picked up my Sunday Hartford Courant from my driveway, came into the house and sat down with it instead of turning on the TV. With a coffee at my side, I inspected The Courant a little closer than usual. YES! This is where I want to have my words printed.
The visual design is not only eye catching but inviting to those who are used to the internet design. The use of CT and .com throughout the paper is a message to the reader that this is “our” paper and if need be, it can be found on the internet. Let’s face it. Most people do go on the internet or watch TV for gathering news. However, papers like the Hartford Courant provide a “down home” flavor and an escape the reader needs from the more heavy-hearted news of wars and collapsing stock markets. Such as today’s column written by Susan Campbell; Noisier Ghosts Might Help.
I believe the new design of the Hartford Courant can and will bring more readers from the internet back into a “new” tradition of reading the local paper. As a matter of fact, I think I will extend my subscription from the Sunday paper to every day delivery.
August 1st, 2009 at 8:54 pm
No matter how good the paper looks, the paper will eventually stop printing. The content simply is horrible. Go ahead and plate the paper in gold, it will eventually fail because of the content.