My favorite newspaper designs

When The Herald launched its redesign back in late August, we had spent the previous five months looking at other newspapers to get ideas for what fonts we would use, what colors we wanted to highlight, how we wanted to write headlines, how we wanted to display photos … and so on, and so on.
So much goes into a good newspaper design that it’s tough for a smaller paper such as ours to consistently have an eye-catching front (we’re hit-or-miss, I admit, but some days, I think our paper comes out sharp).
As editor of a small daily newspaper, I’m not ashamed to admit we grabbed ideas from some of the “bigger boys.” The following are my 10 favorite newspaper designs in the U.S. You’ll see most of them are bigger and flashier, and all of them, I think, bring a fresh approach to an art that, for too long, had no creativity (remember when newspapers would cram 20 headlines on a front page?).
Today, it’s about grabbing your attention. These are the newspapers I strive for The Herald to become.

10. The Republican-American, Waterbury, Conn.

As you can see, the Republican-American had a big influence in The Herald’s redesign. Our basic template is very similar to their’s … the left rail containing teases to stories inside, while the “body” of the paper covers about 3/4’s of the page.
During our redesign process, I chatted off and on with the RA’s design editor, Scott Griffin (click here for his Web site) and he was helpful.
This paper’s circulation is about 65,000, which is considered medium- to large-market. By comparison, The Herald’s circulation is around 10,000 to 12,000.
The Web site, bestfrontdesign.com, featured the Republican-American’s redesign effort back in October, 2005. You can access that site and see more examples of their front and inside pages here. According to the site, the paper’s goal with the redesign was to “target the at-risk and occasional reader by making the paper more useful and unique.”

9. The Seattle Times, Seattle, Wa.

What strikes me about the Seattle Times is that it’s “clean.” Newspaper designers use “clean” to describe a paper that looks flawless, easy to navigate and uses graphics correctly (in other words, I hate when papers use photo cutouts just for the sake of using photo cutouts).
The Times launched its redesign in June of 2004, with the goal of, as I said earlier, better navigation. That was our goal at The Herald as well … to create a product that our readers are comfortable with, a paper that has the features they want in places where they know to find them.
It’s not as easy as it sounds.
I also like Seattle’s use of tease boxes above its nameplate. Our redesign at the Herald pretty much did away with “teases” above our name, but I still like them, especially when they’re effective. In today’s paper, Seattle teased the Seahawks’ big Monday Night Football win.

8. New Orleans Times-Picayune, New Orleans, La.

I lived in Louisiana for more than three years, and during that time, I visited New Orleans a lot and read the Times-Picayune a lot.
I always thought it was a pretty good newspaper. Then Hurricane Katrina came.
It was then I witnessed a good newspaper become a phenomenal newspaper. For the next year, Hurricane Katrina dominated the front page of the T-P. From stories and amazing graphics on why the levies broke, to heart-warming features on survivors and people coming back. The Times-Picayune covered the nation’s worst natural disaster better than I imagine anyone could.
I learned a lot by following this paper during the months and year after Katrina. I learned a newspaper can be extremely important to people’s lives, especially during difficult times.
The stories were always great, but the design was always top-notch as well. The Katrina stories still pop up every now and then (like in today’s paper, which I have pictured … they talk about FEMA and the aquarium), but for the most part, the T-P has gone back to “normal.”
Only now, they have a Pulitzer Prize on their wall.

7. Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City, Ut.

The design nerd in me loves the Salt Lake Tribune because of its fonts. I love the red font they use on their “ribbon heads,” or smaller headlines you find above the actual headlines. The Trib also does a great job with teasers, and often, they’ll do something fun with the nameplate.
What I like most about the Salt Lake paper is its consistency. I’ve never actually seen the inside of the paper, as I’ve never been to Utah (don’t imagine I’ll have many reasons to in the future either), but the front page is always sharp. Their graphics are always detailed, the headlines are eye-catching and usually fun, and the overall look of the paper is one of the more creative in the U.S.
The other thing that makes this paper great is its Web site, www.sltrib.com. People may think the Web site and the newspaper design don’t have much in common, but they’re wrong. WRONG, I tells ya.
One of my hopes at The Herald is to completely redesign our Web site to make it not only easier to navigate (and have much more information), but I want people to use it as a tool to go ALONG with the newspaper, instead of a tool they use instead of the newspaper. Salt Lake’s Web site does this well, incorporating videos with their stories, adding photo galleries and much more.
Plus, if you go to the Web site today, you get to see one of the best headlines ever: Paris Hilton’s efforts to save binge-drinking elephants are praised by conservationists.

6. The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore, Md.

Some credit the Baltimore Sun with starting a trend in newspaper design — the upside down “L”.
If you look at their tease box in today’s edition, you’ll see the tease for “Walking the Walk” wraps over today’s centerpiece story on Baltimore Ravens’ coach Brian Billick. The Sun does this every day.
Now I’m not really sure they “invented” the L, but they’ve been doing it a while now, and a lot of newspapers have followed suit. Does the “L” really have a purpose, other than looking neat? Probably not, though it does flow the readers’ eyes to both the centerpiece story and the story on the left hand side of the page (the rail).
I also like The Sun for its ginormous logo on its nameplate and for its attractive headline fonts. The Sun’s stories look important … dignified because of the font they’ve chosen. The headline could be “Man eats hotdogs until he dies” and it’ll look fancy in The Sun.
What’s not to like about that?

5. Kansas City Star, Kansas City, Mo.

No other newspaper has as much fun around its nameplate as the Kansas City Star. Today’s paper (shown) is actualy kind of tame compared to what the Star usually does.
When new movies come out that they think will attract a lot of readers looking for reviews (The Simpsons Movie, Spider-Man 3 and other summer blockbusters), The Star will weave photos from those movies into the nameplate, often covering up much of the wording … but hey, people in Kansas City know it’s The Star, so do they really need to see that everyday? The answer is no.
I also like that there’s a period at the end of The Kansas City Star. I have no idea why it’s there, but it’s different, and therefore, I like it.
When I get to talking about design, a lot of people will say, “It doesn’t matter what a paper looks like, as long as the content is good.” That’s true to some extent, but it DOES matter what a paper looks like, especially at a time when the industry is declining and people have more options. Using eye-catching graphics above the “fold” (the part of the paper you see in a newspaper rack), grabs your attention, shows you what’s inside and does its best to make you buy a paper, even if you had no intentions of doing so.
I imaging Kansas City’s newspaper sells a lot in the racks because of what they do above the fold. It’s a practive I’ve tried to follow at The Herald.

4. The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

The front page of the Virginian-Pilot looks very little like a newspaper. That’s why I love it.
The Pilot uses big headlines, big photos and doesn’t follow the typical newspaper format we’ve seen for the past 200 years. Their nameplate may be at the top of the newspaper one day and at the fold the next.
It’s not a look for everybody, I imagine. I’m sure some of their readers were a little put off by the redesign (their most recent redesign came this year, though the paper got all “weird” a few years earlier).
I like that it’s different, but it’s also easy to read, and they cram a lot of information on that front page. But it’s not just the front … every inside page looks like it’s been done by a professional, nearly every page looks like it took a whole day to complete. I have no idea how many designers they have on their staff, but it looks like they have more than your typical newspaper (for the record, The Herald has ZERO page designers … our editors and writers put together our newspaper).
If you want to see more examples of The Pilot’s work, go to this site, where they show examples of their recect redesign.
The people of Norfolk are fortunate in that they have The Pilot and The Link, a daily alternative paper that … if I would have included tab-sized designs in this blog, would have definitely made it.

3. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Tx.

I grew up east of Dallas, so the paper I read during my youth was the Dallas Morning News, which I contend still to this day has the best sports section in the United States.
But the News was never much on design, and neither was its close neighbor to the west, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In May of this year, however, the Star-Telegram completely revamped its newspaper, and it’s become one of my favorites, as far as looks go. I haven’t been in the Metroplex since the redesign, so I haven’t seen the “complete” product.
From their editor’s blog: The Forth Worth Star-Telegramlaunched a redesign … reducing width, adding color, and making stories shorter and adding quick-read formats. Each section now contains a “destination” page with blurbs on top stories, while the front page focuses on showcasing the best of the entire newspaper, not just the day’s biggest stories. A new “Your Life” section focuses on health, family, money, and style, and the new Friday entertainment section, “GO!” will be a guide to weekly outings and activities.
As you can see, the main purpose of a redesign is to add content and make things easier on the reader. A redesign isn’t successful unless the paper is a better product, not just a better-looking product.
The Star-Telegram became both. Learn more about their redesign here.

2. The Bakersfield Californian, Bakersfield, Ca.

Look closely at the Bakersfield Californian. It’s nothing like any newspaper you’ve ever seen.
A few years back, the BC launched its redesign and pretty much had every newspaper designer in the country talking. It borrowed The Sun’s “L” and made it better. It added tons of color. It changed the colors of its nameplate … it became a newspaper that looks like a magazine.
Yet, it didn’t lose its effectiveness. Recent papers on the California wildfires were given big-time news treatment on the front, and that “L” allowed them to run large, very detailed photos of the fires and run all the important “news” in the paper’s body.
A friend of mine whom I worked with in Louisiana went on to become a designer at The Californian, and he told me about how the design staff is just as important as the news staff there (well, ALMOST as important). The key to good design is having designers and writers/editors work together. If a designer knows how a story will be written beforehand, and if they communicate well with the photographer about what kind of photo it would or should be, the end product is always better.
See much more on Bakersfield’s redesign here.

1. The Sanford Herald, Sanford, NC.

So, are you really shocked that we made No. 1? Neither am I … then again, I’m a little biased.
Actually, we’re NOT the best designed newspaper in the country, but if you’ve noticed, the title of this blog entry is “My FAVORITE newspaper designs,” and The Herald is definitely my favorite.
We redesigned The Herald back in August, and for the past three months (almost four), we’ve done nothing but tweak it here and improve it there. Our staff of editors and writers, who just so happen to design as well, include myself, news editor Kevin Degon, community editor Jamie Stamm, business writer Jonathan Owens, special projects editor R.V. Hight, sports editor Alex Podlogar and sports writer Randy Quis.
For a small daily newspaper, I don’t think we’re half bad. We hope the redesign has made things easier on readers, and we appreciate our readers for being patient through the growing pains (wrong sudoku puzzles, odd things happening to our photos, etc.).
We’ll continue to improve on what we’ve started over the next year, and perhaps we’ll come up with an even better design down the line.
Until then, please e-mail me or call and let us know what we can do to improve.