Live pages from the Creative Loafing relaunch, debuting June 10, 2010, in Atlanta.

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CREATIVE LOAFING REINVENTS, FROM ATTITUDE TO AD INNOVATIONS

[June 10, 2010]
“Would you describe your paper as more of a lecture, or a conversation?”

That was the question I asked Editor Mara Shalhoup, after I was first invited to consult on the redesign of Atlanta’s Creative Loafing – one of the nation’s better known and pioneering alternative weeklies – and I had analyzed several months of the paper, and some early in-house prototypes. Her enthusiastic response – “a conversation!” – inspired a number of ideas that I shared with the staff and that quickly found their way into design models (created during an intense weeklong “redesign boot camp”), and into the paper’s vibrant relaunch, making its debut today.

CEO Marty Petty and VP/CMO Henry Scott had asked me to visit Atlanta to push the staff to create something new and bold and wake up the market. On a “Wow Scale” of 1 to 10, I suggested we create concepts and designs that aimed for 11 or 12. (If we had to scale back to 8 or 9, for resources or other reasons, so be it – we’d still be ahead of the game.) This included advertising destinations as well as editorial innovations. We all wanted the “conversation” of this reinvented paper to be more provocative, raucous and fun, in design, content and spirit. To wit:

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I suggested that the “old school” labeling system for department logos and key pages – Contents, News, Editorials, Music, Food, Listings – be replaced by an “active voice” concept: catchy, unique and imperative. The Contents page becomes START (more on that below), and a new corresponding end page (inside back cover) is named STOP, with a handful of elements to make the readers pause before making their exit. Music turns into LISTEN. Arts and Entertainment is now LOOK. The paper’s seriously yummy Food coverage lands in TASTE.

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A hallmark of alt weeklies, at least in the U.S., has been their saucy ads in the back, for – ahem – gentlemen’s clubs, dating hotlines and the like. Brainstorming over dinner, Henry Scott told me these pages are always treated internally with sort of a “wink.” I said why not seize this and just run with it, package content around it, to create a page or even a pullout section called wink*? (Italics for this logo, please, and an asterisk to boot.) On the more serious side, the paper would be reintroducing an editorial page. Why call it Opinion, when we could brand it THINK? With these bold headers, we jump start a conversation, an imperative one, running through the book.

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Eclectic, bold advertising has always been part of the appeal of alt weeklies, and ad innovations were a key thing I wanted to put on the table. Create new shapes, anchor them with new unique editorial features, and give advertisers (lost or new) a reason to be excited about print again. Suddenly we had a half-dozen new concepts to put in front of advertisers, each with a distinct name, philosophy and rate structure – the Intruder Ad, the Peel-away, the Strip, the Sandwich Ad (shown below), and others. Some may not fly with advertisers, but why not mock them up, put them out there, and give it a try?

Here are some more details of specific features and the process:

AN FRESH NEW TAKE ON A CONTENTS PAGE

The new contents page, START, includes a premium ad position.

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The START page was one of the toughest things to design, aiming for a little “orchestrated chaos,” and still may require fine-tuning, but a challenge that Mara and Creative Director Markus Schneider dove into with gusto. For starters, I asked, does anyone really read traditional index pages (Contents) in a paper like this? Maybe a reader wants to know the page number for music listings, so yes, lets find a few inches for an index (to the left of the new START logo); but do I need a narrative teaser for every single story? “POLITICS: Residents fuming as mayor seeks increase in water rates. See Page 9.” (Hello, 1987 called, it wants its index back!)

Such things are a burden on the staff to create, a dubious use of precious news hole, and a bore for readers, who mostly either go right to the departments they really want to read (food reviews, etc.) or leaf through and scan every major headline, looking for the juicy stuff. After the cover, this is really where the conversation begins – so I envisioned a Page 3 that would feel like someone entering a really fun party, with a diverse, exciting, vocal mix of guests: Read the full article »