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.

The China Daily — the largest English-language daily and China and known to many of us as the paper that hired Bill Gaspard a few weeks ago — launched a redesign today.

A before-and-after look at page one (click anything today for a larger view):

A story posted on the papers’ web site explains there will now be a daily in-depth “cover story,” with which…

…we aim to set the news agenda instead of just follow it. Our talented team of roving reporters will bring you the voices from the heart of the action, while our exclusive interviews with key policymakers offer a broader understanding of the motivation behind the decisions.

Here’s the jump page for today’s cover feature, Gold Standard:

Creative director Jonah Kessel tells us:

This redesign has been a very interesting experience. In some ways, the issues we face in China are much different than in the West; other issues seem to be universal.

Last night I asked Bill Gaspard at 3 a.m. to rate “the pain” involved in this redesign, compared to other projects he has been involved with. Beer in hand, with a smile on his face, he said, “about an 8.”

While monetary issues don’t necessarily make the top of our worry list here, many more people have eyes on what we do. Normally, we try to meet the needs and wants of our readers and publishers; but, here we are trying to meet the needs of our editors, publishers, government officials, a diverse expatriate population, a Chinese population — all while trying to push forward in the notion of a free press. Its a very tricky task, a very difficult task and at times, a very fun task.

Back to the paper’s news story:

One of the major aesthetic changes is the nameplate, which is based on the color of the original 1981 nameplate. The “Futura” font is a modern and bold new version, while the original handwritten Chinese characters were kept as a symbol of China Daily’s 28-year evolution from a newspaper to an international multimedia group.

The nameplate was introduced to readers last week via a four-page wrap, Jonah says.

This was a little different than anything I had done before. I had this idea of “Hollywooding” the new nameplate into the Great Wall about 4-months ago when I started this project. It took a couple trips to the Great Wall to get the right image, but eventually I found the right light.

Here are before-and-after looks at the new editorial page…

…the new features page…

…and the new sports page:

Big changes are in store for a small zoned insert. The paper reports:

Metro Beijing, inserted into the flagship edition for the Beijing market, will expand from four pages to eight, making the Beijing edition a 32-page daily. Serving millions of international readers who arrive in the capital city every year, this section combines news reporting with service information.

The paper reports:

This model will eventually be replicated in Shanghai and Guangdong, providing more localized content for each metropolitan market.

Go here to read the paper’s story explaining its own redesign. Find a second story and video here. Find a letter here from editor Zhu Ling.

Find Jonah Kessel’s blog here.

Here is the new logo for Emrooz, a newspaper based in Iran’s capital city of Tehran:

Do you see a dancing woman in the logo? Some do.

I’m not quite sure when Emrooz redesigned, but the page on the left, here, is reportedly from a year or two ago. The one on the right is a more recent front:

Radio Free Europe’s Golnaz Esfandiari reports this week:

Last month a hard-line weekly Partoye Sokhan accused Tehran Emrooz, which is reportedly close to Tehran’s mayor and Ahmadinejad rival Mohammad Bagher Qlibaf, of redesigning its logo to make it look like a dancing woman.

The weekly, which is close to the ultra hard-line Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, explained that the letter “r” in the logo looks like the leg of a dancing woman. It also said that other letters in the logo have been changed to look like arms and a head.

The weekly called on the Culture Ministry to warn the newspaper over its logo.

These folks are quite serious. Apparently, banners showing the logo have already been defaced:

Esfandiari reports:

The editor in chief of Tehran Emrooz, Rasul Babayi, said earlier this week that the paper will amend the logo “with a sense of sadness” in order to put an end to the controversy that it has caused.

But not before folks have had at least a little fun with it. Here, an editorial cartoonist depicts parents discovering their teenage son, um, enjoying the logo:

And another web site suggested a series of tweaks to the logo to, presumably, make it less sexy. Yeah, y’know, this might work:

And folks at this site seem to be having a nice laugh over the controversy. My favorite comment, submitted by a reader:

What are the words the “dancer” seems to be crapping?

Find the original Radio Free Europe report here. Find the humorous tweaks here. Find the cartoon here.

Here’s the first print newspaper redesign — that we’ve heard about, anyway — of the new year…

Here, a free weekly tabloid based in New Brunswick, Canada, launched a redesign Thursday.

A before-and-after look at the cover:

Design consultant Lucie Lacava writes:

The Lacava Design team worked on a full redesign and content rethink with editor Charles Mandel, transforming Here into a leading-edge urban alternative magazine. A redesign of the website will follow later this year.

A closer look at the cover:

Lucie also posted a number of inside prototype pages (click any of these for a closer look):

Find a gallery of old-format Here covers, um, here.

Express — the free youth-oriented tabloid published by the Washington Post, launched a redesign Monday, Ernie Smith tells us.

Ernie writes:

We’ve made a lot of changes to the overall look that emphasizes bold design in a way that the paper really didn’t before.

The covers, for example, are now in a magazine style, closer to Link, Red Eye, TBT and other publications – past and present – like us. Reflecting the newsy nature of the District, our cover stories will mainly focus on hard news over soft – so no entertainment, and probably not sports right away.

Here’s a closer look at the new front:

Ernie continues:

This is a huge change for us. Before, our covers were very templated – usually with a photo in the center and a rail that consistently styled. Now, we have a lot more wiggle room.

Interestingly, Monday’s redesign kicked off with an interesting promotional ad that wrapped around the edition. Below left is the day’s “front page,” that actually appeared on page — despite what the numbering said  (note a promo across the top to page “3″). Below right is the promo page.

Ernie continues:

Express‘ format is different from most other papers I’ve worked at in that section editors, not designers, do much of the basic layout. The layout style reflects this – heavily gridded, no bastard measures for most stories, infrequent use of reversed type, so on and so forth.

A before-and-after look at the national news page:

A closer look at the new national page:

Now is probably a good time to tell you that the pages Ernie sent us are missing the ads. Hence, the white spaces.

The font changes, according to Ernie:

Old News headlines: Knockout
New News headlines: Flama

Old Features headlines: Miller
New Features headlines: Farnham (which I like a ton better, BTW)

Old Decks/Body Type: Miller
New Decks/Body Type: Fenway (that’s right, we changed our body type)

Our “utility” font of sorts, the slab-serif, is Popular, which is still kinda new – we added it after a page shrinkage seven or eight months ago.

Here’s the new cover story page:

A before-and-after look at the sports page:

A closer look at the new sports page:

Again, Ernie:

When I was brought on in February, I was the first designer the paper had that focused strictly on the news section design (rather than entertainment or features). Much of the work I’ve done so far involves “punching up” smaller designs or helping with larger packages, with focus mostly on news and sports pages. The big change for me with the covers is that I’ll be designing a daily cover package which will allow for a bit more freedom in design approach than things we’ve done in the news sections in the past.

Other features to note: Our entertainment pages are now much more colorful, and we’ve introduced a new Web-centric page called “The Feed,” which presents cool stuff that we’ve found all over the web (much of it on our @ExpressFeed Twitter account).

We simplified overly complicated pages (EyeOpeners, specifically) and added extra layers to things that could use more dynamic approaches (our TV page).

We should probably note that the pages Ernie sent us are all missing the ads. As you can probably guess.

A closer look at the new Eye Openers page:

Ernie, again:

The redesign was handled in-house by art director Scott McCarthy, with input from everyone in the newsroom. He did great work.

A before-and-after look at the Lookout page, near the back of the paper:

A closer look at the new Lookout page:

Ernie concludes:

The bulk of the comments so far have been regarding the cut in comics, from six to two.

By the way, you can download PDFs of any edition of Express, any day, here.