Charles Apple

The Vindicator of Youngstown — a family-owned 56,412-circulation daily in eastern Ohio — today fired up new presses and launched a redesign of both its print and online editions.

A before-and-after look at page one:

Among the changes:

• A new nameplate. The paper says a variation of this was used by the Vindicator for nearly 100 years before it was dropped in a 1990 redesign.



The paper says:

The Vindicator logotype was created by the influential American typographer Edward Benguiat, who also created logotypes for, among others, The New York Times and Sports Illustrated.

• New typography. In a reader’s guide published Sunday, the paper says the new fonts are…
  

  …easier to read and slightly compressed to help retain story lengths. You will notice that we increased the point size of our body copy, making the type much larger than before.

• The A and B sections have been combined.
• A narrower page width — what the paper calls “a new, modern size.”
• More graphics and navigational aids, the paper promises.
• A color business page most days.
• And, of course, new $10 million offset color presses. The previous press was letterset.

Here’s a TV commercial for the project:

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UPDATE: Oh no it isn’t. I embedded the commercial here, but then discovered it plays automatically. To hell with that — I don’t trust auto-laying videos. So you’ll have to visit the links below to watch the commercial.

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Find a story about the redesign here. Find a story about the new presses here.

Here’s the reader’s guide that ran Sunday (click for a larger view):

Go here to download a PDF of this page.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:00 am and is filed under Redesigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.