Robb will be presenting on video storytelling May 24-27, 2007 in Stockholm, SND-Scandanavia Conference.
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
It takes guts, imagination and a real investment to come up with something new. How many newspaper redesigns do we see that become instantly dated because the wheels of innovation stopped spinning once the new design ‘launched?’ True innovators don’t stop reinventing.
Make your paper work better not just look better
It’s been an accepted practice at many U.S. papers to try and modernize and market their product with a periodic redesign. It makes good business sense to make swift improvements to a product and demonstrate to consumers that their loyalty is being rewarded. But newspapers have traditionally been so hidebound and change-averse that they typically wait eight or ten years to make major improvements in their products. And they often introduce dozens of changes on the same day and disorient their loyal customers.
Imaginations are like muscles — you either use them or lose them
Exhibit A for proof of a better process lies with The Guardian of London. The Guardian in the last year have transformed themselves into the top newspaper and Web site in the U.K. and Carolyn McCall, Chief Executive of Guardian Newspapers, says that making innovation a core business principle for their company led the way. They changed everything but their values and are reaping the benefits.
Looking for quick fixes
Redesigns are often being pitched as a cure for drooping circulation. Some think that a shiny new design will signal to a modern audience that the paper has caught up their expectations. Disturbingly, it appears that the emphasis is being shifted from measuring the quality of the improvements and making a paper work better for readers to measuring a short-term boost in circulation - a quantitative measure that often has more to do with the marketing and circulation department’s contributions at launch. The mission and purposes of making the paper better with each edition should be the focus of a redesign - not taking credit for a boost in circulation that may or may not be attributed to just the newsroom changes.
The numbers that matter take longer to come in
Churn (the turnover of subscribers) is a big factor in any circulation success story. If a redesign team wishes to be measured principally by circulation gains then it seems premature to declare victory by a momentary spike in interest - at six months and one year publishers will learn if the paper is really serving it’s community better.
Redesign - but don’t stop reinventing the culture
A deeper investment and stronger leadership effort is needed to transform a typical newsroom from one that resists change to one that is comfortable perpetually reinventing itself. A redesign can be a catalyst for improvement - but only if the leaders use it wisely and don’t ever stop the innovation process. Newsrooms can make their newspapers relevant again if they first adopt genuine and lasting innovation as a valuable business principle. A tool to use every day and not every once in a while when their circulation audit, advertising survey, or market research demands it.
» Robb Montgomery is a newspaper design consultant and the CEO of Visual Editors.com. He recently redesigned The Examiner for San Francisco, Baltimore and Washington D.C.
The new design for The Examiner has been steadily making its way into the existing editions (Washington and San Francisco) since mid-February. Quietly, without the usual brass bands and reader trauma. Compared to recent flashy redesigns, The Examiner represents a kind of un-design ‘ redesign’ — the goals we developed were based on a core desire to produce an upscale daily news tabloid that works hard to provide daily intelligence in a magazine-style form. A free tabloid with an upmarket quality standard is a first for a daily in the U.S.
What this also meant is we weren’t going to be designing a paper that relies on gimmicks to be noticed. All that matters is that the new design reveal the character of the new Examiner — smart, interesting and relevant to your life today.
When you look at the page examples shown online please keep in mind that these ARE the inside pages - the ones that usually don’t get a lot of attention from newspapers when it comes to planning sophisticated daily packages around the way people are living their lives these days. That all of the inside pages can be well-designed is a true measure of the success of this redesign and presages the work to come. A high story and image count usually leads to confused and sloppy pages. But here the use of scalable and modular components allows the editors to include a lot of information and still present them in a dynamic and inviting ways. There are still some well-developed prototype pages that haven’t made it into live editions yet - and that’s OK because The Examiner’s culture is adapting to one that embraces an ‘eternal renaissance.’ The new stuff will appear when they are ready - and that’s important because there is excitement in a newspaper when journalists are encouraged to find new ways to develop stories and improve the paper with each edition.
The foundation work for a redesign of The Examiner began in November, 2004 with the exploration of new headline and body copy typography as well as a remake of the front page and the news section. At that time The Journal papers in D.C. lacked any quality design elements and the San Francisco font mix was not calibrated to produce an upmarket newspaper. Both papers needed more legible and practical type tools - a sensible set that looked credible and modern but also had a good count that would allow news editors to write headlines that actually said something. These upgraded type specs debuted with The Examiner launch in Washington D.C. in February 2005. Those early efforts set the table for a comprehensive redesign process that began in earnest in November, 2005.
This redesign phase uses the same type families I specified a year ago but have been painstakingly groomed to emphasize a more refined sense of scale, space, weight and width. We did ask the Font Bureau to craft a couple new weights (a semi-bold for Caslon and a semi-bold Benton Gothic) but overall the type is graded and matched to a higher standard than before. By never really stopping the redesign process, the editors expect to keep their innovation muscles strong and nimble enough to adapt quickly to community expectations, market demands and changing media consumption habits. A modern redesign, in my experience, is a real opportunity to make your newspaper and newsroom work better — not merely a chance to dress up a paper with new type and color palette. This April launch date is not the end of the redesign thinking at The Examiner. It’s merely a milestone on a trend line for innovation that began for them back in November, 2004 and will, with luck, continue long into the future.
» Robb Montgomery is a design consultant and the founder of Visual Editors.com and an interenational media consultant. More examples of his redesigns can be seen at Robb Montgomery.com
