Charles Apple

The Boston Herald launches a redesign today, according to a story posted overnight on the paper’s web site.

A Boston Herald front page from May of last year.
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The unbylined story reports the tab is reducing its physical size and will be printed on the same presses on which roll the Wall Street Journal…

…a deal that means more color and better and more consistent reproduction for the paper’s readers and advertisers.

This is also the paper’s first front-to-back redesign since the early ’90s - one we hope you will agree makes the paper better looking, easier to read and understand, and more cohesive from cover to cover.

Unfortunately, the Herald was a no-show Monday at the Newseum. Here’s hoping the new front pops up there this morning so we can show it to you.

Meanwhile, if anyone from the Herald could send us some before-and-after pages, we’d love to post them.

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The Tampa Tribune launched its redesign this morning.

New new page one:

Here’s your before-and-after look:

I dropped by the Tribune’s web site in hopes of picking up a story about the redesign — a column by the editor, quotes, a readers’s guide, jpegs of inside pages. Anything, really. After all, the St. Pete Times reported:

[Tribune editor Janet] Coats declined to reveal many details about the new newspaper design coming Monday, saying the Tribune has its own marketing plans for spreading those details later this week.

When you go to TBO.com and click on news, however, this is what you see:

Hmm. Didn’t Paul Newman die last Saturday? Probably not the best choice for your lead online news story right now.

The page images above are from the Newseum.

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EDIT:

I couldn’t found it, but my trusty Google alert did.

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ANOTHER EDIT:

Sportsdesigner has the sports front and several interior sports pages. Find ‘em here.

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The Tampa Tribune will launch a smaller, two-section paper Monday, its competitor, the St. Petersburg Times, reported this week.

Today’s Tribune.
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Yes, all this was reported a couple months ago, too.

Few details are available at the moment. More when we know it.

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Today marked the launch of the long-awaited, much-anticipated redesign of the Chicago Tribune.

It’s on the streets. But not in the Newseum, unfortunately — as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, anyway. So here’s the best look we can get of today’s debut front:

Here’s a before-and-after look:

Our friends over at SND/Update have posted an extensive slideshow of the first edition and a video of travel-weary Weather Channel hurricane chaser Jim Cantore walking us through the project:

Oh, wait; our mistake. That’s the Tribune’s Steve Cavendish. Even better, then! Find it all here.

Poynter’s Sara Quinn posted an interview with Tribune design director Jonathon Berlin about the redesign. And, of course, we previewed the redesign last week. Find that here.

SportsDesigner has PDFs of a special wrap-around section commemorating success Sunday by the Bears and the White Sox. Find all that here.

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UPDATE

Whatever else you do today, do not miss the video our buddy Robb Montgomery shot today of readers’ reaction to the new Tribune:

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Meanwhile, The Oklahoman of Oklahoma City also launched a major redesign today, reducing its width a 44-inch web:

The obligatory before-and-after:

This was a Maria Garcia company redesign. He’s posted a number of before-and-after examples in his blog.

Read more about the redesign on the Oklahoman’s extensive online users guide:

Poynter’s centerpiece story at the moment is the redesign of these two papers plus the Hartford Courant, which launched Sunday. Find Sara Quinn’s story here.

Also, Chicago-based design consultant Ron Reason gives his thoughts about the new-and-improved Tribune in his blog today.

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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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As we posted earlier today, the Hartford Courant launched its redesign this morning.

Coming Monday: The Chicago Tribune, of which we posted a preview last week.

Also coming Monday: The Oklahoman of Oklahoma City, which is a Garcia Media project.

Also Monday: The Hagerstown, Md., Herald-Mail. is cutting down to a 44-inch web width. Editor John League says the reduction is accompanied by a redesign.

We’re trying for before-and-after samples. Stay tuned.

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