Melanie Shaffer, design director of the Hartford Courant, sent us a big batch of PDFs this afternoon of her paper’s new redesign.
She writes:
It’s been a wild week. I don’t think anyone can be fully prepared to launch a redesign in just about 14 weeks.
We had a great centerpiece all set to go for the launch, then Paul Newman passed away. He’s a long-time Connecticut resident so we new we had to do it right. We had also known he was ill, so we were prepared for his passing, however that was in the old design style.
I had two designers working exclusively on this redesign with me, Chris Moore, my deputy design director and Tim Reck, my lead features designer who is a stickler for details. None of this would have happened if these two hadn’t worked their tails off.
The rest of my teeny staff of graphic artists and designers (nine in all, including me) took on the extra work and plowed through the daily grind all summer long.
Melanie Shaffer in a local Fox News TV report on Friday.
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Oh, and thanks for the dorky quote off the TV spot. The pressure of the video camera turned me into a bumbling idiot.
Ah, I don’t think Mel looked like a bumbling idiot at all! I’ve been on TV before and it is indeed unnerving.
I’m quite pleased with the redesign, though. I was awfully worried about this one. Like many of us, I’ve long been a fan of the cleanly-designed Hartford Courant. I didn’t want to see that spoiled.
And it wasn’t spoiled. The new design is punchier, but still very clean; very classy.
We posted it this morning. But here, again, is the new page one:
Melanie wrote a bit about the new nameplate:
When our staff and newshole reductions were announced in June, we knew that the content that couldn’t continue on in print had to move online. We also knew there needed to be a cycle of the newspaper feeding the web and the web feeding the newspaper. Topics start in the paper, they move online for the public to comment, then that conversation moves back into print.
With that thinking, my objectives were to blend Hartford Courant and courant.com in the masthead.
We wanted to be unique and clever in this design. We always had the dot at the end of the our masthead. We used that dot to add the dot-com. Many, many many variations of working that into the masthead exist. This vertical masthead retained the traditional script of the Hartford Courant, which was very important to me, and blended it with both the .com message and the new font we brought into this redesign.
We turned the corner, if you will. This masthead was literally worked to death with details up until last Tuesday.
I think the vertical masthead puts more emphasis on the design, especially the centerpiece package. We are also bringing illustration onto the front page for the first time. Traditionally, we have only used graphics and photography. We have always been a paper with an artistic bent and will continue to honor our strong photojournalism. With this redesign, I wanted to incorporate illustration into the options in a smart, sophisticated edgy way. You’ll see some of that in the coming days/weeks.
This new masthead moves us out of the traditional newspaper approach of lede-story. Newspapers haven’t been breaking news vehicles for a few years now. We’ve been second-day focused, but haven’t released ourselves from the tradition of the strong right-hand lede.
Going forward, we are focusing on the best news story of the day as both the lede and the centerpiece. We’ve shifted our lede A1 designer to an earlier start to plan and work the visuals. Of course, if important breaking news happens on our news cycle, it will still be featured prominently on our front page.
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Sports remains a freestanding section. The daily sports section will have classifieds folded into the back:
A closer look:
Melanie writes:
With the .com objective on the front page, we had to continue that onto the inside section fronts and also create simpler navigation for our readers. Our web refers take our readers all over the place with unique redirects. Now, each section front has courant.com worked into the page banners. So for stories within that section, a reader can go online using the section’s redirect and find those stories on that splash page (courant.com/CTLiving for instance). Our Deputy Online Editor worked out the details of renaming the online sections to better mirror the paper’s sections.
We also started something called ReaderSpeak. These reader quotes are featured prominently in the banners of the sections and throughout the paper. We are bringing the conversation from online back into print. Readers can comment on a story today and have their timely comment featured in print the next day.
Our research shows that more than 50% of our print readers are also online.
My managing editor, Bobbie Roessner, also thought it was important to incorporate our strong Connecticut focus into the naming of sections. That is why you’ll see a CT in front of each section. We are still Connecticut’s largest news gathering organization. This naming was also mirrored online.
The daily edition folds Connecticut news and business news into the front of the A section followed by a new Nation/World spread and then the old editorial pages, now renamed CTOpinion.
Local, biz and editorial remain freestanding in the Sunday paper. Mel writes:
We took all our newshole reduction out of the daily so we could maintain the Sunday paper. Research suggests our readers spend upwards of 4 hours on the Sunday paper. That time commitment is considerably less during the week.
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The Sunday Connecticut section is now CTWeek:
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Sunday Consumer is now CTConsumer:
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The Sunday Commentary section is now CTOpinion:
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The Sunday Arts section is now called CTArts. Mel writes:
Yeah, we know it reads c-tarts without the color distinction.
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Mel says the CTLiving section is a freestanding section seven days a week…
…though with considerably fewer pages and with obits and the weather page at the end of the section.
The Sunday travel page — formerly called Journeys — is now the Sunday CTLiving page:
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Melanie writes:
The Home & Real Estate name stays the same, though our Friday broadsheet section is called CTHome:
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And there you have it: The new Hartford Courant.
Many thanks to Melanie for taking the time to show us around!
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