The wrong way, right way (5/18/05)

If you want to talk about typefaces, count me out.

The CR's re-design process, which culminated last week in the launching of the daily newspaper's new look, has been a long, remarkable road.

When we were done, we figured we could do side-by-side seminars on how to do it and how not to do it.

How not to do it came first.

We'd been kicking around the idea of re-designing The CR for a number of years, but about three years ago the idea started to gain traction.

I started things in what turned out to be the worst way possible.

First, small d democrat that I am, I decided to involve everyone in the newsroom.

Mistake number one; only a handful of folks cared about the topic. Others had no real interest.

Then, we plunged immediately into the deep end of the pool. People started designing wildly different variations of what they thought pages ought to look like. There was absolutely no consensus and — because I wanted to see lots of new ideas and had done a re-design myself in the early 1980s — no direction.

Obviously, that was mistake number two.

When sample pages were posted in the newsroom, they were completely incoherent. There was no logic behind them. And they were easy targets for snipers who wandered by and sniffed that they were dumb-looking or hard to read.

That first misfire cost us almost three years, because once the critical comments came in, no one had the confidence to stand by his or her ideas.

The real impetus for the second try came from CR sports editor Ray Cooney. He's the one who urged me to return to the question, and he's the guy who kept our feet to the fire when it would have been easy to say we simply didn't have time to take on a project of this size. Thanks, Ray.

When it came to the second try, which began in January, I think we did some things right.

First, we cut the number of people involved. Instead of everyone, it was Ray, managing editor Barbara Wilkinson, news editor Mike Snyder, and myself.

Second, we took a much more step-by-step approach.

At the first of what would be many weekly meetings, we looked at one question: What did we like about the old design?

The answer was that we thought it was pretty easy to navigate and not badly organized, but that it was dated, needed to be more legible, and needed more local color.

The next step was looking for design elements we liked in our paper and in other papers. All of us marked up dozens of pages.

Ray bought out a newsstand somewhere in Ohio and brought back "idea papers" to look at.

We used the Internet as well. (Were you aware there's a web site you can go to that gives you a look at the daily design of front pages of more than 350 papers in more than 35 countries at www.newseum.org?)

We also turned to expert advice, taking turns reading a book called Pure Design by newspaper guru Mario Garcia.

And, finally, we started with the basic building block, the typeface and type size used for articles in the newspaper.

We spent weeks on that alone, trying to get the right point size, trying to manipulate the type font so that it was more vertical and more legible, trying to assure that we didn't reduce the quantity of information delivered.

Then we spent days and weeks debating headline typefaces, trying to find those which could be married together effectively.

Only after the four of us had agreed on a text typeface and typefaces for headlines did we begin to experiment with what pages might look like.

Even more debate followed, but unlike the first time, we had a bottom line of consensus and the pages we produced were remarkably more coherent visually than they had been before.

Finally, after several weeks more of tweaking and changing, we printed a short run of a prototype edition and circulated it for comment from friends, family members, and other readers. They recommended changes, applauded some ideas, and critiqued others.

Newspaper redesign isn't something I'd recommend for anyone.

The closest thing it compares to in the non-newspaper world is building a house as your own general contractor and having to decide on every nail, screw, and fixture.

In our case, the absurdities were reached when we had discussions that lasted 20 to 25 minutes on the appearance of lines which tell readers that a story is continued.

We got through it; and based upon the reactions we received from a short-run prototype model we printed and the finished product, we did okay.

There's still more tweaking to do, but trust me, the continued lines stay just the way they are. That discussion is closed.[[In-content Ad]]