Content stays same but typography changes
Readers may have noticed that today’s Observer has a different look.
We’re in the process of redesigning The Observer and today we’ve
implemented the changes in the A section. We’ll bring Sports and the B
section into the fold later this week.
The content won’t change at all during this process. All of the
elements that we had before will continue to be included in the paper,
as well as their placement.
What has changed is our typography. For the first time in decades
we’ve changed the typeface for our news stories. And we’ve changed the
typefaces for our headlines and what we call standing heads.
Our new font for stories is New Baskerville, an industry standard for years and not significantly different than the New Century Schoolbook font that we’ve been using for years. In changing to a new typeface, though, we decided that we should also incorporate a larger size for better readability. So we increased the size of the type and the leading — the space between lines. This will make stories take up more space, but we’ll accommodate that. The added leading gives the paper a more airy, and we think cleaner, appearance.
We’re switching out the Times Roman font that we’ve used since our last redesign in 1998 with Palatino as our primary news font, Aachen for our heavy, sans serif font and helvetica, the industry standard for just about everything, for our other headline font.
Our new design incorporates more subheads and break-out boxes.
Including those in the design will be largely contingent upon having time to incorporate them as we build the pages. But the goal is to use more of them.
The front page flag, or nameplate, was simplified, with some of the elements once included now pushed to the bottom of the page.
The weather box on Page 2 has all the same components, but a new look. We’re hoping to update the icons for the various weather conditions in the near future.
A redesign has been on the drawing table for some time. The last time we launched a new design was in January 1998. The design we’ve had has worked well for more than a decade, but it was time for a little refreshing.
It just so happened that this summer we had an intern, Tristen Knight, whose specialty is design. She had just graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication and was accepted in the Snowden Intern Program.
She offered to come up with a plan for our redesign. Throughout the summer she studied up on some of the best examples of modern newspaper design, then gradually began putting the components together.
We tested some of the pages out earlier in the paper. We liked the look and received a good reaction from people we talked to.
So today is the culmination of Tristen’s efforts. She put in a lot of work and I think her ideas make The Observer both more readable and more appealing.
We’ll probably be doing some tweaking here and there in the coming days, but by and large I think Tristen’s design for The Observer is one that should carry us forward for the next several years.
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Opinion 
