The LAT's new design critiqued as "Ransom Note" ...

Brilliant!

http://cagle.com/news/blog/

 

What a horrible old-school design: A five-column picture that goes with only one of the columns below it.

 

Make the main and sub hedes the same font. The rest....eh. They're entirely different elements and it's a bit disingenious to point out the photo credit and cut as being "different fonts" since I'm pretty sure it's that way at tons of other papers. It was at mine.

 

I'm amazed at how many newspapers go through a "redesign" and end up looking even worse after it.

 

Holy fuck that is ugly. Nothing like going through a whole redesign to make your paper look like it was published in 1945.

 

It looks like an attempt to look like the NYT front, but the fonts are too big, and the one-column main ones on the right are too compressed.

 

More interesting is that of the four stories, none are from LA and this is the LA Times.
As for the font complaint, *shrug*

 

Michael Ramirez, famed cartoonist, thanks for stopping by ...

Sorry, I'll get better.

 

And now, here's something we hope you'll really like.

 

That looks like a cross between The USA Today and The New York Times. Pick one style and go with it, geez!

At the weekly newspaper I worked at, I used Times for most headlines with italics for features. Captions were in Helvetica bold 9, photo credits are Helvetica 6 in all caps, stories are Times 10. The production staff and I would get in disagreements when they'd try to sneak in a sans serif font for sports hedes...

Then again, I've seen a college newspaper where every story had a different type face. Of course, that paper was so bad at the time that one of the bookstore clerks told me she'd have to rewrite every story so it'd actually make sense. The only time she didn't was when I submitted a guest column.

 

FYI:
2006 SND awards:

Los Angeles Times and its magazine, 107

The New York Times and its magazine, 99

Excelsior of Mexico City, 72

Hartford Courant, 57

San Jose Mercury News, 55

The Boston Globe and its magazine, 52

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 47

La Presse in Quebec, Canada, 43

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, 40

El Mundo of Madrid, Spain, and its magazines, 40

National Post in Toronto, 38

The Guardian in London, 35

The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, 35

San Francisco Chronicle, 28

Gazette in Montreal, 23

Clarin in Buenos Aires, 22

The Dallas Morning News, 22

Politiken in Copenhagen, 22

 

This rolled out a couple of months ago. First day, I got a headache trying see what it was all about. Threw it in the bin and haven't looked at it since.