First look: Hartford Courant redesign launches Sunday
The Hartford Courant gave an exclusive sneak-peek of its much-anticipated redesign this morning to its local Fox News affiliate, Fox 61. The redesign launches Sunday, one day before the redesign of its corporate parent paper, the Chicago Tribune.
A video capture of the new front page shows it is indeed a radical change for what has traditionally been one of the world’s best-designed papers:
Yep: That’s a sideways nameplate you’re seeing. TV reporter Logan Byrnes breathlessly announces in his video report:
This has never been done before in any newspaper in the United States!
Earlier this week, Romenesko posted a memo from Hartford Courant editor Cliff Teutsch to his staff in which he explained the new nameplate:
We decided on a vertical masthead which will give our front page a dramatic new look signaling the changes to be found in the rest of the paper. By retaining our name in the historic script, we honor our tradition. By adding a dot com, we reinforce that we are a unified print and online news organization. Now, in addition to proclaiming that we are the oldest continuously published newspaper in the country, we’re adding a second bragging line: “read by 800,000 Connecticut residents every week in print and online.”
The video report doesn’t really give a clear view of the entire page one prototype. In addition, that’s pretty much the only page the local Fox affiliate showed.
The screen cap above is the best I could pull. Here’s one that shows the bottom of that same page:
Teutsch also mentioned 40 new columns and features in the soon-to-be new-and-improved Courant and a teaser marketing campaign running in the paper and on a billboard on the Courant building.
Courant design director Melanie Shaffer in the TV report.
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In the TV story, Courant design director Melanie Shaffer mentions the new “punctuation front” will be Rockwell. “It really bolds up the design,” she says.
Read the entire Teutch memo here. Watch the video report here.
September 26th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
Can’t wait to see it on the doorstep Sunday morning.
The news story was on a Tribune-owned station, FYI.
September 26th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
sigh
September 26th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I’m so jealous, I wish I could do that with the school paper. But we just don’t have the images or the stories to drive such awesome work. I love the Flag.com that’s brilliant connectedness.
September 26th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
It’s not the same dot from the existing nameplate, is it?
September 28th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Yes it is. The dot/period at the end of our masthead is what led us in this direction of connecting courant.com without the repetition of the word courant.
September 29th, 2008 at 9:30 am
I’m torn. I really like a lot of this (and deep down WANT to like all of it), but it’s definitely not the razor-sharp clean and classic Courant. The nameplate (the part I really, really want to like) feels a little trendy to me, although I do like how it frames the page. Plenty of style points, but how functional is it? At what point will it become a design trap rather than a functional element?
Overall, I really like what they’ve done, but I can already tell I’m going to miss the classical look of the Courant.
September 29th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Just to clarify, the sigh was more a reaction to losing the old Courant’s design style, rather than the redesign.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
I have been reading the Courant for 40 years ,if this what I will be getting in the future I guess I will only read my Local paper. Mondays paper should have been free there was nothing in it that was not in our local , I use to read it cover to cover today it took about 5 minutes it is to bad the Courant was a great paper I will see what the rest of the week brings .
Richard A Gill
September 30th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I am truly saddened by the Courant’s last independence by adopting the “cookie cutter” look and feel of the Orlando Sentinel as mandated by the Tribune. Very shortly all the Tribune papers will pretty much look the same as they struggle to meet Tribune revenue requirements and content/advertising mix. The Courant’s challenge is to meet the content/ad mix without turning off it’s readers. Already we are seeing more shared articles in shorter bites-
Maybe USA Today isn’t such a bad paper!!!!