Charles Apple

The Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa, launched a redesign Monday.

The Times circulates about 61,000 copies in the Quad Cities area along the southeastern border of Iowa and Illinois. The paper is the flagship of the Lee Enterprises chain, which is also based in Davenport.

In case you’re wondering, the Quad Cities are Davenport and Bettenforf in Iowa and Moline and Rock Island in Illinois.

Page one designer Francie Krantz Williamson send us a big pile of new pages overnight.

A before-and-after look at page one:

That’s Monday’s debut front on the right. On the left is a front from early December.

A closer look at the front:

Francie writes the entire chain is now using Quiosco for body copy:

Corporate mandated the body [font] to make it easier to share copy.

[Other] Fonts are Benton Sans for headlines, Helvetica for breakouts and Franklin Gothic for cutlines.

She says the mix of sans serifs is something that may be changed soon.

We have a design committee that will be addressing things as they come up and tweaking, tweaking tweaking. [Content Management Editor Jim Gale] even says the design should evolve.]

Page A2, before and after:

A closer look at the new A2:

The opinion page, before and after:

A closer look at the opinion page:

The local front, before and after:

A closer look at the local front:

The sports front, before and after:

A closer look at the sports front:

Francie writes:

We combined features with classifieds, and got rid of the Real Estate Front. In its place, we introduced a new Monday features page called Solutions, which is designed to “give people answers to life’s everyday questions.” It has a locally-written column as well as ‘how to’ guides. I helped get the page off the ground. In my research, no one has a page quite like this in any other newspaper.

Francie concludes:

I’m proud to say no one has called to complain about puzzles. I’ve been through 3 redesigns and this is a first for me. We actually made the puzzles bigger!

In addition, the aforementioned visuals manager, Jim Gale, is leaving the Quad-City Times soon to relocate his family to Pennsylvania. Meaning the Times is looking for a new “online print/presentation editor.” Extensive knowledge of both the print side and the online side is required. Find that position posted here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 1:03 pm and is filed under News design, Redesigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.