Design With Reason

Newspaper Redesign and Visual Thinking, With Designer-Educator-Consultant Ron Reason

7 Things to Love About The Stranger:
An Illustrated Guide.

Covers from  The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper

My client newspapers do not always find it helpful for me to just show up and offer my No. 1 piece of consultatory advice: “Stop being so boring,” bop them over the head (Dogbert-style) with a rolled-up newspaper, and leave. They say: Ron, we want specifics. We want role models to aspire to.

I share crazy ideas from other clients, like when I got the San Francisco Examiner (on death’s door) to turn its back page Sports section upside down. You know, flip the paper over, so you can read the pages logically, sequentially, instead of backward, like other daily tabs. (Laugh if you like, but people talked about it, and a year later the paper was sold for a fortune, to that Denver billionaire! Somewhere, a Chinese publishing dynasty is rolling around laughing in big piles of cash! The idea was also adopted, and adapted, by clients in New York City, Nairobi and Dubai.) Work I have done for the mafia seems to be especially popular, as well.

I also share ideas picked up in my travels. In today’s column, I present a curated potpourri of cool things observed in the print edition of The Stranger, Seattle’s venerable alt-weekly, in hopes that other papers who read this might become less boring, draw new readers and advertisers, and better serve their communities. Editor Christopher Frizzelle and his staff obviously know how to do it, care about the details, and look like they’re having great fun. (“It’s true that it’s a marvelous place to work – best job on the West Coast, I always say,” he wrote to say today.)

Culled from three issues picked up at this weekend’s AAN convention in Toronto, please enjoy these 7 Random Things I Love About The Stranger. Click to enlarge any image for more detail. MSDs (mainstream dailies) in particular, please note: This column is NSFBN* Read the full article »

Want more zip?
Grade your paper’s spirit

Great conversations with creative directors and production managers here in Toronto, with the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. There aren’t a huge number of the art folk here, but they are smart and passionate about their papers, digital products and overall brand. Several have shared this concern: with the tightening of news hole, and down sizing (or elimination) of visual budgets, “I worry my paper looks formulaic and routine. How can I convince my editor, publisher or owner to take this seriously? If we think this way about the paper, imagine what the readers and advertisers must feel.”

Good point. If stuck in such a rut, you’re probably fit to be tied, don’t know this way from that, and maybe even want to chew on a pickle! The paper is probably making “some” money. It’s gotta be acceptable on some level, or the bigs would say: something’s gotta give to freshen up and get us back on track. What is that and how do we do it?

For starters, I urged one creative manager make his case this way: back home, post as many of their most dull (or gray or chaotic or monotonous) layouts on one wall of a conference room (Wall of Shame). On the opposing wall, tape up as many cool, dynamic, open, inviting, surprising pages from the wealth of papers that were shared here in Toronto or that you have gathered from elsewhere (Wall of Fame). Assemble your paper’s brain trust, ask them to study both walls, and say: Read the full article »

An alt-weekly wish list

[Newer Post: 7 Things to Love About The Stranger: An Illustrated Guide.]

More thoughts from a weekend immersion in the world of alternative weekly newspapers. Fun crowd with lots of talent, energy, and passion, despite the challenges of the current economic climate. Here’s a little fantasizing about where I’d take them in a perfect world of even slightly expanded resources and unbound imagination:

FORMAT: I’d give every paper a format with page dimensions that offer some contrast. Tall and lean like The Stranger, small and lean (and stitched) like the compact Weekly Dig in Boston. Anything but the squatty, square dimensions adopted by many alt weeklies (and mainstream US daily tabloids). There’s just no contrast in the square shape, and it very often diminishes the contrast you can create in your layouts; aside from the rare 2-page spreads I’m seeing, there’s really little chance to really create some wow (at least in the shapes of text and images) within the square tab shape. (In most cases, cost savings and/or the realities of printer restrictions have forced the move to this shape, I’m aware.)

HEADLINES: I’d challenge the hammer head/ deck structure that seems to carry 90% of the stories in alt weeklies. The 2-3 word hammer heads, in particular, often say little and waste an opportunity to grab the reader. Worst offender: headlines in 48 pt or above that simply give me the name of the movie, musical act or play. Looks like a press release or a poster for the event; generic, boring, and hey, I’ve already seen the name of that movie a million times. Give me a little spin. Read the full article »

More AAN food for thought

A few utterances from my presentation for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies here in Toronto:

  • “Does your paper look like a lecture or a conversation? A press release, or a party?”
  • “Why just redesign? Rethink. Revisit. Reinvent. Not just the look, but what you do, who you serve, and how.”
  • “Why is it that Taquitos and Kate Gosselin are marketed better than newspapers?”
  • “Relaunch: the time to ask, ‘Why not? What if?’ “
  • “I don’t want to blur the lines between advertising and editorial. I want to redraw them.”
  • Always good to quote the inspiring journalistic pioneers who came before you, such as T. Herman Zweibel, Publisher Emeritus of The Onion news-paper, who once headlined a Note to Readers: “This colorful new re-design is for advertisers, not for you.” (A collection of Zweibel’s classic columns can be found here.)

Read the full article »

Table of Contents pages: WHY?

DISPATCHES FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF ALTERNATIVE NEWSWEEKLIES
One bonus of attending a journalism convention is you get to see a ton of samples of fresh papers in one fell swoop. No reader ever sees newspapers this way, but it gives me a chance to think in fresh ways about why and how we do what we do. Thus begins a series of posts with random observations about alternative weeklies, and newspapers in general, from the convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, this weekend in Toronto.

[TORONTO] Once I got past the exhilaration of seeing tons of great alt-weekly covers in one fell swoop, gathered up several arms full and hauled then off for review, I quickly dove inside and came to this realization:
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Contents pages are almost always super boring, ugly, redundant, and uninviting.
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Give me a small index, fine, telling me where I can find the movie listings. But in a weekly paper, where we should assume lots of people do a thorough flip-through, does anyone really need or read a summary of each story in the paper?
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[Table of Contents, Creative Loafing Atlanta - pre-redesign]
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Especially with a diminished news hole, is this the best way to greet your readers on Page 3 or 4 or 5? When many have already heard your pitch via cover lines … and daily Twitter and  Facebook shouts … and email blasts? Read the full article »

Redesign check-up: Portland Press Herald

Every so often I’ll go on the Newseum gallery of daily front pages, and check up on random former clients. A few days ago I was pleased to see this front page from The Portland Press Herald, whose redesign I directed about 6 or 7 years ago. (Time flies!) Sometimes you look at a former client and sigh, oh God, look what a mess they made of this. (Hasn’t happened too often to me, luckily. It pretty much only happens with a client on the cheap who won’t spring for a Design Style Guide.) Other times you think, oh God, please, update this thing already, even if someone else has to do it, this design was fine for 10 years ago but get with the times! And other times, you are blessed to think, this is a design that holds up well. This was my reaction Read the full article »

Creative Loafing relaunch, Issue 2 highlights

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[ATLANTA] The second issue of a relaunch always brings tweaks and adjustments, and a creative energy that often the heat of launch week might not allow. Such is the case with the new look for alt weekly Creative Loafing. Here are a couple of section openers that really caught my eye.
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They live up to the challenge we gave ourselves in rethinking the design, navigation, and indeed, brand: to create WAY more impact on the opening pages, while maximizing the presence of a new section name/logo, the art on the page, and headline and text, which must remain, due to space constraints. A difficult juggling act, Read the full article »

Appearing soon @ AAN in Toronto, SND Denver

Just confirmed: headed to Toronto mid-July to speak at the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Weeklies. Following is a draft of  the session, tentatively slated for Friday afternoon, July 17:

Topic: “Redesigning? Don’t just aspire. ATTACK.”

Gone are the days when redesign meant new fonts, maybe a new logo, perhaps moving things around or jazzing up your covers. Today, any relevant redesign starts with serious strategy about revenue. What innovations can we design to pull in new advertisers, retain those at risk, or lure back those lost? How do we create new editorial “WOW” – probably on a shoestring – to anchor those premium spots? How do we pull in the sales teams as early as possible, devise marketing messages with punch, and create stronger marriages with editorial? This session will include a look inside the just-launched rethink of Atlanta’s Creative Loafing (blog case study and visuals here), and perhaps a hint at changes ahead for other papers I am working with.

Check out conference info here.

Also: Headed to SND in Denver in September, where I’ll talk about my work over several years with The Standard of Nairobi, Kenya (and likely a few other peripheral projects as well). I’ll talk about our major rethink of editorial and design strategy, as well as marketing, staff training, and Read the full article »

A new START for Atlanta’s alt weekly

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 »

News boxes get arty in Atlanta

[Related post: Inside the Creative Loafing redesign and a first peak at live pages.]

[ATLANTA] Redesigns should be a chance to have a little fun, interact with the community, and generate “buzz” in new ways. I loved Creative Loafing’s outreach to the Atlanta arts scene, inviting notable artists to paint news boxes around town. Below is a look at the promotional announcement in this week’s paper, and a glimpse at some of the work.

Read the full article »