The Daily Record of York, Pa., launched a redesign Thursday.
On the left is a page from February. On the right is Thursday’s debut front:
It’s a minimalist change, but for the better. The elimination of the left-side rail will allow for much better play of art on the front. But more about that in a moment.
Daily Record editor James McClure writes in his blog:
The York Daily Record has changed its look — a process called a redesign — once a decade.
In the early 1980s, the newspaper brought in Rob Covey from the Seattle Times to head a makeover in its design.
In 1993, Lou Silverstein from The New York Times consulted with editors to provide the look and feel of the newspaper as it is today. The addition of daily front-page color photos, so commonplace today, was a major feature then introduced.
That look has remained more or less in fashion, but we’re looking to update it — a bit of nipping and tucking.
So, you’ll see a slightly different, fresher look in the York Daily Record/Sunday News on Thursday.
We’re viewing this as an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change.
McClure writes that circulation for the paper — daily average is about 46,000 — is still very strong. So he’s not calling for a dramatic remake.
My pal Brad Jennings — who has sent people to nearly every speaking appearance I’ve ever made in Pennsylvania, attended my show in West Chester last April himself and is sending a staffer to my show Friday in Williamsport — writes:
The redesign work was done by me — I’m the visual editor — and Chris Glass, who is the AME of Visuals and Multimedia and also my boss. I developed the design plan after months of tinkering by a small group of people here. And Chris has done a great job helping to organize everything that goes into a project like this.
Neither of us had ever attemped anything like this before. My design background came only from my 10 years designing pages for the Daily Record. So I knew what worked and what was broken, but neither of us was formerly schooled in design.
Brad Jennings (right)
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When we first started out on the project, the sky was the limit. But when we factored in constraints on time, manpower and cost, we found we really were not dealing with that large of a playing field. So we looked at what needed to change, focused only on those things, and didn’t sweat the stuff that still worked.
We’ve been thinking of this more as a refreshening of our design, moreso than a redesign, as many of the same fonts and styles will be used. It’s evolutionary, not revolutionary. When our readers pick up our paper, it’ll still look very much like our paper. (We hope.)
The three main objectives:
- To make better use of our horizontal space.
- To lighten up our pages, which weighed heavy under thick black rules associated with the previous style
- To give designers more flexibility in areas such as the 1A skybox — our previous design was structured to be the same every day, and that quickly became white noise to readers and left our skyboxes looking stale.
So, among the biggest changes:
- No rails on section fronts. We think you’re right in that few people read the one on 1A, which was full of refers to other stories. We compacted this info and packaged it at the bottom, and the shape will change daily to give designers more options and to keep that from getting stale. We’re calling it “The Block.”
A closer look at Thursday’s front:
- The content of some of our other section-front rails was still fun, quick and useful. We repackaged some of that stuff across the bottom of those fronts. That shape also allows us to use bigger art there than we could in 8.9-pica-wide rails.
- Like you said, no rails means more horizontal space to play stories and photos at appropriate size. With a shrinking web-width, to limit yourself by another inch-and-a-half horizontally is not smart.
- We used to have a lot of thick, 6-point rules above briefs, lead stories and elsewhere. We also had a thick, heavy Helvetica Compressed font that we used two dozen ways throughout. These looks seemed dated and heavy. We opted to use more air space to set items apart, instead of black rules.
- We color-coded each section front, with the section letter placed in a color block at the top right. Sports is blue, Living is green, Local is bronze and so on. The color is accented in small overlines running with items in those bottom-page rails I mentioned.
- We also use the section color for an overline on our lead vertical news story on section fronts. The color splash draws attention, and allows us to get some easily identifiable key words in the overline to draw readers to that story, where otherwise a one-column headline might struggle because of its parameters.
- We are going with horizontally cropped mug shots for columnists, and we’re playing them across one column instead of notched in copy at a half column. This adds more personality to the writers’ voices, but more importantly — our columns used to start with the columnist mug notched into the start of the copy. So you immediately began reading a column where every word broke to another line as the text ran down the side of a mug. It wasn’t inviting.
- We decreased our weather graphic space by half, which freed up about 18 inches. We dropped all national info and focused on local only. (If you’re headed to San Diego, you’re not checking the YDR for weather info anyway.) … We put that new graphic to use a few weeks ago. With 126 inches a week at stake, why wait?
- Our desk editors will be efforting alt-story reporting and writing on a more frequent basis. And jump guidelines will help us avoid jumping stories whenever possible.
In the end, we think this design will be better for our readers. But while we think they will notice some of these changes, we don’t think they’ll be too shocked, jarred or upset by them.
The Daily Record is owned by Dean Singleton’s MediaNews. It is in a joint operating agreement with the York Dispatch.
Find McClure’s column here.
