Alan Formby-Jackson

The Herald in Scotland (c.55,707, July 2009) has completed a redesign.
Palmer Watson had done a major redesign last time out but the team felt the time was right for a freshen up.
Editor Richard Walker took some time out to let us know his thoughts on the process.

The brief for the Herald redesign was simple. The last redesign of the Herald was by Palmer Watson of Edinburgh and completely transformed the paper and its section. The design had served the paper well for a number of years and the last thing that was needed was a complete change of appearance and character.
However, the design did need refreshing and as a company we wanted to bring the Herald and its Sunday sister the Sunday Herald closer together in terms of visual approach. We also wanted to give more impact to our opinion and comment content, which featured the best columnists in Scotland, and to more clearly define our arts coverage, which was not really being promoted properly.

We kept the Din headline face for lead in the Herald news section but imported the Poynter face which is used in the Sunday Herald. The combination of Din and Poynter would become a feature of the new-look Herald and would be shared by the Sunday.
The Herald would remain broadsheet and the Sunday would remain compact but sharing the same family of fonts would give a much clearer indication that both newspapers came from the same family.
We slightly increased the leading in the main body copy and increased the white space in the horizontal space between stories.
The 8-column grid needed by advertising is too narrow to be adopted as the only grid in the news pages so we adopted a more complicated grid which allowed wider column widths in the main stories on the news pages.
We introduced a new Opinion front page and a new Arts front page, using Poynter as the page heads in both cases and balancing longer reads with smaller ‘furniture items’. We also expanded the letters page to form the main element in a double-page spread.

The changes have provoked an encouraging response from readers. Many wrote to say how much they liked it. Indeed, the only complaint was the type size of the crossword clues, which had in fact been changed only very slightly in the redesign.
However, we have now significantly increased the size of the clues … and made many readers happy.
Next on the agenda are the Herald and Sunday Herald weekend arts platforms and then the sports section of both newspapers.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.