Alan Formby-Jackson

After all the hoo-ha (in the newspaper design world anyway) about the changes over at the Orlando Sentinal, one of the oldest newspapers in the world (f.1785), The Times, had a bit of a redesign itself.

Jon Hill, associate designer at The Times, spared some of his time and talked about why and what they did.

The design changes mostly came about due to the new full-colour printing presses. We wanted to exploit this development and use the colour wisely. It also opened discussions around flatplanning, typography and full colour graphics.

Although there was no specific target to the changes, eg. the standard briefings to compete with other titles; aiming for a specific demographic etc. we were fully aware that in full colour and with our page size and number of display adverts, we could quickly become a mess and look similar to a freesheet. A lot of the work was around reducing headline sizes, making graphics more authoritative, choosing a controlled colour palette and generally organising ourselves better.

Whilst the main paper has become more refined, we’ve developed times2 to become more irreverent and it now has the energy of a daily magazine.
The supplements are being refreshed and will be rolled out during the summer. Bricks & Mortar has changed already.

In terms of typography, we have retained, but lessened the use of, Hoefler’s Gotham. Times Modern (designed by Luke Prowse) is still the main headline font and we worked with Patrick Giasson at Monotype to develop an italic range of weights to match the roman. The italic is mostly used in times2 and provides a useful foil to the headlines in the main book.

Headlines in the main book range from 24pt to an average of 36pt, though on feature spreads and the front page we go up to 54pt.

Jon added that they have approximately eight news designers who work on rotation and approx four features (times2) designers. Many of the news pages are drawn up by subs.
The graphics desk have approx 12 artists who work on different shifts across the day/night.

Jon led the design team, which consisted of himself, Emma Woodroofe and Andy Keys. Jon Jones led the direction for photography, Tony Garrett led the graphics direction and Chris Davalle and Chris Richardson sorted out many of the technical issues. Anoushka Healy ran the project liaising with editors and commercial managers. The team are based entirely in-house.

Jonathan Bailey and Peter Howarth at Show Media developed much of the direction for times2 bringing their magazine experience to the section.

For the official line on the changes read this which also has over 500 comments from readers.

Alan Geere has his say via the UK Press Gazette here.

Peter Wilby from The Guardian likes the main paper but says times2 is “dreadful” - read his piece here.

Peter Preston from The Observer writes here.

While in his column for the Evening Standard in London, Roy Greenslade has, shall we say, a few reservations - go here.

So after all that we can now look forward to the redesign of the Sunday Times on July 6.

Read about that here.

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