DMN's makeover du jour — Thoughts?

When will people in our industry stop trying to reinvent the wheel and just decide to provde people with more and better stories and information?
Iget a headache looking at all these trimmed down (46-inch web= less news hole in the paper), redesigned to see if we can catch your eye not your brain, newspapers.

 

Content, schmontent, spnited.

 

I don't think anyone is trying to reinvent the wheel here. But I understand that's a convenient message board post to make. I also think it's a convenient stance to say that any design change is about "catching the eye and not the brain".

I don't think we're going to change the world by making "SportsDay" a 0,80,95,10 CMYK mix, but I really do think there's value to using color navigationally (sorry that comes off as patronising).

They were making the paper a smaller size whether we changed or not. We could have just complained about cutting costs and written about the good ole' days and that could have been it. By making the body type easier to read and spacing our stories out a little better we could make a lot of the people who read us happier. We're not trying to win the Noble Peace Prize here, we're just trying to make the paper we work on easier to read. Is that only wrong because a designer did it? If editors thought about it as part of their job, would that be "reinventing the wheel?"

And at the same time,we worked to make the stories and information on each page better. That's a major focus of our time at any point — design changes or not. And I wish it were that simple. Is it that simple for you, spnited?

 

DMN may have had its share of problems, but it still (at least where Sports Day is concerned) tries awfully hard to cover a lot of stuff.

Rob, I like the new look, but some of the section and topic heds remind me of Fort Worth (without making you go inside for the full story). Did you do some of the changes with the S-T in mind?

 

I've been a big fan of the FWST since way before I worked in Dallas, so they've definitely had an influence personally on the way I approach design. Especially all of Cody Bailey's work back in the day.

But for purposes of these changes, they really weren't a motivating factor. If anything looks similar, then it's not by intention. But if you say it reminds you of them either in their current version or a previous one, then I'd take that as a compliment. They are a great looking paper.

 

Well said Rob. I definitely agree that this doesn't even come close to "re-inventing the wheel". I also take issue with the suggestion that a redesign that leads to a little less text in the paper aims to "catch the eye, not the brain". From the presentation about the redesign, it looks like you guys only lost about 1 line per inch. If that is the line between appealing to the eye and appealing to the brain, then it's an awfully thin line, and if that were the case, then I think the product's quality would be questionable to begin with. While there are always exceptions, in general it's asinine to suggest that if you write a 20-inch story and have to cut 20 lines from it, your story would suffer significantly (and I say that as someone with significant writing experience). As I have tried to make the point before on this board, communication isn't limited to just text. Visual communication (design) is just as vital. Unfortunately, there are some who see any change that results in a loss of space for text as a loss of intelligence in the product, whose first reaction to hearing about a web reduction is "Well we need to start running fewer pictures so we can fit in the same amount of story." And since, as you said, the web reduction was coming whether you guys wanted it or not, I would give you guys some kudos for making tweaks to improve the readers' experience. And for those who think that things like body copy size and leading don't matter to readers, ever wonder why bookstores often carry several different versions of the same book, at different sizes and with different text size and spacing? It's because those things do matter to readers.

As for this particular set of tweaks, I like the added leading in the body copy. I love that you guys finally added rules to separate stories. The white space alone just never quite did it for me when I looked at DMN pages in the past, because I think it takes a significant amount of white space to truly create a visual separation between stories. So I'm very glad to see the rules.

I do have to agree, though, with some of the other posters' comments about the color-coded section flags. I think they look clean and vibrant. However, I don't think this particular attempt at color-coding is all that effective. If you guys were putting out an all-color tab and used color coding on every page so that someone only needs to look at the corner of a page to know what section they're flipping through, then that would be a good application. However, in your case your sections are already separate from each other. You're also only coloring the section flag, and not carrying it into the inside pages. So really the only time readers would interact with the color-coding is when they are on the section fronts, and IMO, in those cases, readers will recognize the sections by the giant names in the flags much more quickly than by making the mental connection "ok, green equals Business, tan equals Healthy Living, etc."

 

Jeebus. How many top-notch designers have come from St. Joe? We have Rob Schneider, Clark Grell ... did Matt Humphrey come from there, too? Am I missing anyone?

 

There's a long list of people who went on to bigger things after working in St. Joseph.