Charles Apple

Salt Lake Tribune uberdesigner Colin Smith recently launched a redesign of In This Week, the Tribune’s free alternative weekly youth-oriented tab.

The tab — and its previous design — is three years old, Colin says:

I cleaned up the look a little a year ago when we went to a new front-end system, but those fixes were more technical than stylistic.

In This Week circulates 40,000 copies. The redesign hit the streets Aug. 27. Colin posted samples at VisualEditors and invited us to partake.

He writes:

The goals were to clean up the look, widen the visual appeal to target a broader demographic and simplify production. The result is a mostly template-driven redesign that incorporates many of the structural changes already implemented and gives it a nicer frame. Antenna is used for nearly everything (except body type).

Media One, the folks who print the Tribune, Deseret News, In This Week and a myriad of other niche publications, wanted to include more of a variety of promotional items on the cover.

This was my attempt at getting all that stuff out there. The new logo was designed to incorporate the Web site URL without making people think the print product was called inthisweek.com.

By the way, click any of the double before-and-after images for a larger view.

Colin tells us:

AME for Presentation and Online Josh Awtry helped immensely. Basically, I did the prototypes and built the templates and style guide while Josh worked really, really hard to convince the advertising side that changing the logo isn’t the worst thing ever. He was also the guiding hand that helped shape the editorial and structural changes that preceded the redesign by about a month. Although, really, he’s my hero for getting the new logo through.

Colin continues in his VizEds piece:

The previous design had become a bit, well, messy. This new design emphasizes modularity and clean edges to increase legibility.

By combining two columns onto a single page, and limiting each column to the same length each week, nearly two-thirds of a page was opened up for new content…

…in this case an expanded look at Web content.

All section fronts use pretty much the same templates. All entertainment sections (Music, The Arts, Style and Film + Games) are set in the lime green color.

Template.

Template.

Template. (Seeing a pattern here?)

The idea is that, by keeping the design simple where it doesn’t matter (headline positioning, font choices, color variation, etc.) it gives reporters, editors and designers the chance to really shine where it does matter (content, creativity, personality, etc.).

Template (with a rust color used to brand all sports content).

Template (with a dark green color).

Oh, and all Dining section fronts start on a color page now because, well, black and white food photos are, quite possibly, the worst thing ever. Worst. Thing. Ever.

There are several full-page columnists and, well, they all look like this.

Templates — gotta’ love ‘em.

Template (ta-da!).

The old [calendar] design was looking a bit disjointed (and sometimes the staff couldn’t find a good concert or event with art for every day) so this new design takes a more straightforward tack.

Inside calendar pages:

Colin concludes:

I wouldn’t call anything about this redesign new or innovative, but rather it’s a concerted effort to consistently create the best possible design with limited resources. But, then again, isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?

Find the In This Week web site here.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 6:31 am and is filed under Free publications, Redesigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.