(At first, I will go into detail about little design tweaks. In later posts I will talk about big picture goals for the redesign as well as post photos and screen shots of before-and-after design examples.)
The current style features something around six to eight different typefaces, all in varying weights and styles. In its current state, the style is dated and inconsistent. Over the years, the set design had been butchered semester by semester by night editors and designers in an effort to make content fit. Because of this, the design styles were thrown out of wack and looked, well to be honest, fugly. For example, the legs are consistently on different baselines from column to column. This is due to the workflow on the stories - the headline, deck and copy are consolidated into one box for convenience. Unfortunately, this causes uneven legs and inconsistent spacing in elements.
The main concern I have with the current design what is known as "reader fatigue." Reader fatigue basically means that the reader gets tired, distracted or even subconsciously annoyed by the way the copy or elements read in the paper or on the spread. This can be caused by columns that are too long, leading that is either too narrow or too wide and many other things. The Daily's current design philosophy is to fill space. This causes designers to pull columns too wide, possibly 15 to 20 words per line. The general rule, according to numerous CMA design sessions taught by newspaper and magazine professionals, is to limit your words to eight to ten words per line in a column. In the current setup, The Daily was forcing readers to read almost twice as much copy per line that is recommended. Also, in the copy, the settings allow for too much space between words that causes the copy to look like a sponge, riddled with holes. This causes the reader to jump from word to word, again, creating reader fatigue.
To me, the last thing I want is for someone to put the paper down because in the back of their mind the design wasn't helping them absorb the information. That is why on the redesign, I chose a larger, more readable typeface with more idea hyphen and justification settings that keep the copy tight and readable. This, along with new design rules for column width, should make The Daily considerably easier to read.
Aside from copy changes, I've also tackled The Daily's headline, deck and tag type faces. As I said before, the style featured six or so different type faces, which is a big no no in the print design world. Each type face had their own personality and seemed to clash with the others. The serif used as the headline type, Warnock Pro, was dated as a headline font. The paper's headline and tag font, Myriad Pro, is almost equally as dated and did not agree with the line shapes and heights of Warnock. I wanted to find a serif and sans that agreed with each other. One problem I had was I could not use any fonts that we did not currently have installed. Due to tightening budgets (the first reason we are going to a 22-inch web format) I was unable to request new fonts. This is truly unfortunate because our student media department has some dated fonts. One goal I had with this redesign was to freshen the paper up to current standards. That meant using new, more modern fonts. This was not an option very early on, so I had to adapt my strategy to this. I'll talk more about this at a later date.
Right now, I have to get back to work on the dummies to show the editors tomorrow. The schedule gives the editors Thursday through Sunday to look over the dummy and make notes of potential problem areas or any changes that I might need to consider. We will have a big meeting discussing as many pieces as possible on Sunday.
Hopefully by later today or late tonight I will be able to post some screen shots of the dummies to give you a preview of what things might look like.
That's it for now.
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