Charles Apple

The Chronicle Herald of Halifax, Canada — circulation 107,485 — launched a redesign today.

On the left is Monday’s front. On the right is today’s:

Right away, you can see the nameplate is smaller, which doesn’t strike me as a bad thing. And the headline fonts appear smaller. Which isn’t so good, I think.

In a page one story in today’s paper, John Howitt — the assistant director of features and design — reports:

To ensure that your reading experience is both easier and more pleasurable, we’ve changed and enlarged our text font.

Called Slimbach, and designed by noted American type designer Rob­ert Slimbach, it is strong, elegant and easy on the eyes.

Our new, more modern headline font is named Strayhorn. Designed by award-winning British author, lecturer, artist and font designer Michael Harvey MBE, it is a unique and easy-to-read typeface.

Find Strayhorn here. Read more about Slimbach here.

A closer look at the front:

Other features of the redesign:

• Color-coded sections.
• An index on each section front.
• An improved weather package on the back of the B section.
• A graphic summary of the markets across the top of the biz front

Find the A1 story here.

In a bit of a reversal of the usual trend, the Daily Chronicle of DeKalb, Ill. — circulation 9,304 — switched to a wider format today.

The paper went from a 44-inch web to a 48-inch web, says Daily Chronicle editor Jason Schaumburg. This was because the paper changed printers.

On the left is last Monday’s editon. On the right is today’s debut edition:

Click either for a larger view, of course.

Jason tells us:

The top of A1 is all that changed as a result of our transition to printing at Paddock.

…I redesigned the top to give it a cleaner look. The previous look was created before I got here in November.

The name of the paper is now bigger and more prominent. I moved the teasers from the top of the page to below the nameplate and used the red bar to separate the two. Our newspaper Web site also is more prominent is this look.

Find the Daily Chronicle web site here. Find Jason Schaumburg’s local news-oriented Twitter feed here.

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.