Robb Montgomery

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