Honolulu Advertiser launches redesign
The Honolulu Advertiser launched a redesign Monday, cutting down to a 44-inch web width.
On the right is Monday’s page one. On the left is a front from last month:
Advertiser editor Mark Platte wrote in his Sunday column:
Design Director Christine Strobel has had a huge hand in upgrading our look, going over details for the past few months that retain the crisp look of The Advertiser while adding new navigation techniques and font styles.
Though the overall space has been reduced, we are increasing the size of the body type to make stories easier to read. The four daily sections of the paper (A section, Hawaii/Business/Classified, Sports and Island Life) will remain the same. The Sunday sections also will not change.
“The resizing of The Advertiser was an excellent chance to pull design elements across sections together,” Strobel said. “The image area is getting smaller, but we’re spacing the stories out more and bumping up the type so the readability will be improved.”
A closer look at the new front:
If you’re like us, you saw that headline and wondered how they possibly could have put the apostrophe upside-down.
Christine set us straight: It’s not an apostrophe.
It’s an okina.
We have two diacriticals that are particular to the Hawaiian language: Okinas, which are backwards apostrophes and and indicate a “hiccup” in sound, and kahakos, rules over vowels that emphasize and elongate the sound.
About the redesign itself, Christine tells us:
From the design-geek standpoint, I can speak a lot to the changes:
- We anchored Web coverage on A1 (left rail) to promote the freshest stuff happening on the site. That anchoring is duplicated in Editorial and Sports.
- We dropped the flag and added skybox refers to inside stories (it’s inset 1p3 all around for an airier look and to avoid using actual boxes, save the blue bar.
- Color scheme is primary: Reds and blues, occasional spot gold, a creamy screen box.
- 1-col heads are centered with a red kicker now, to save us space on readouts on stories that have less room now.
- Body type bumped up to 9.3 on 10.3 lead (from 9/10).
- Spacing within stories is p9, spacing between stories and rules is 1p3.
The point of these last two was to greatly improve the readability of layouts, so even though we were shrinking, it wouldn’t “look” smaller.
So far, so good: The only complaint we got was from a woman who was angry we had to slice an hour off the morning and evening TV grids in our features section. We dropped a start on A1 to make room for the “L” bar (Web and flag refers) and accommodate the new spacing.
Owned by Gannett, the Advertiser has an average daily circulation of about 142,000.