The world as it should be

Here are some things I think I think about newspaper design.

1. Good design is important, but content is king. I think most people – except maybe for out-of-work designers – would agree. I do believe the point bears repeating, however. It should become a mantra, chanted throughout the newsroom. Readers don’t care whether you use Arial or Franklin Gothic for your cutlines. They do care about getting good content and design that doesn’t get in the way.

2. Designers are important for setting up the format and overall layout and spacing guidelines, but are less important than reporters and editors to the day-to-day overall product. It almost pains me to write those words, but I think it is true. Push comes to shove, I would rather have writers and editors than designers.

3. Design cannot be treated as a cosmetic add-on after all the content has been gathered. Design concepts must be integrated into the newsgathering process from the very beginning. The best time to think about design is when the assignments are being made. Bring the visual people into the planning meetings. Don’t simply  hit them up on deadline for some clip art to “dress up” your story.

4. I don’t think people who lay out ad-free pages should worry about making each issue a completely unique set of pages. Readers don’t care, and the reality is only a handful of placements on pages work well any way. It would speed up the process to have a designer create a series of 5-6 templates and then get out of the way.

The copy desk folks could then call up the template that fit the best and make the few, small changes the content requires. No need to re-invent the wheel each issue and no need to pay designers to do layouts. That’s like paying police officers to be school crossing guards.

Pages with ads on them need designers even less. The ads pretty much limit what can be done beyond slotting in stories and packages in the space available. Again, get a designer to set up some standards and train the desk folks in the basics and be done with it.

5. I think newspaper designers worry too much about typeface, color and related issues that readers simply don’t care about. Although I think branding and user experience can be helpful in market differentiation, most newspapers have a monopoly. The web, magazines and television are competitors only if you stretch the term a bit.

There’s an understated beauty in black-and-white, and I think an all B&W newspaper could be successful. It would be an easier and slightly cheaper paper to produce. Every buck you could save would help.

I’d spend money on solving circulation problems and getting ink that doesn’t come off on your hands, clothes and tablecloths.

6. I think the Society for News Design has created this monster by (a) handing out thousands of awards each year, and (b) rewarding “pretty” when it should have been rewarding “successful.”

All those awards are ridiculous, and SND still pretty much ignores the vast majority of newspapers in the country, the small-circulation dailies and weeklies. It would be like handing out 15 Best Picture statues at the Oscars. Those awards remind me of the many self-congratulating awards that advertising folks hand out to one another in a number of competitions. The creative ads win, sure, but I want to know whether they succeeded in moving product. That’s a good ad.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

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Newspapers are shrinking faster than a cheap cotton t-shirt in a hot dryer, both in terms of the business and the format. Revenues? Smaller. Circulation? Smaller. Number of pages? Fewer. Format? Smaller.

We all know about shrinking newsroom staffs, ad sales and circulation numbers. That’s pretty old news by now. But newspaper designers are facing their own special challenges as more and more papers are moving from the broadsheet format — which itself has been shrinking toward the proportions of a reporter’s notebook — to the tabloid.

Readers seem to prefer the smaller size, and unlike media professionals, don’t seem to equate tabs to yellow journalism. Advertisers have been slower to embrace the tab. That frightens me a bit, because I believe a successful newspaper is going to have to please advertisers first, then bring the readers along.

But it hasn’t stopped at the tab. Papers in Europe, which seems to be leading the way in newspaper innovation, have devolved to the Berliner format (basically an 11 by 17) or even A4 size, the European equivalent of our letter-sized paper. The A4 is 8.3 by 11.7 inches.

But it doesn’t stop there. Jacek Utko, a Polish designer who gained some fame this year for a talk at the weekly TED conference (watch it at http://tinyurl.com/dc8l7y) , believes that newspapers, and those who design them, need to think even smaller, all the way down to mobile phones.

As with the move from bulky broadsheet to tab, the push is from readers who want portability and ease of use. People today are permanently attached, it seems, to their mobile phones, which are used more like portable information and communication devices than as telephones. The iPhone, for instance, is a great little text machine and web browser, but not so good as a phone. People don’t care. The phone part is secondary to them.

Tomorrow’s designer will have to create a structure for the news on less newsprint than ever before, and on web sites, digital readers (e.g., Kindle) and mobile phones.

When it comes to size, bigger may be better, but smaller appears to be winning the newspaper race.

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If you need help with your newspaper design, contact me at News Design School.

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Part three in our series on small newspaper redesigns.

(So far, we’ve covered deciding the scope of the redesign and whether a consultant is needed in No. 1, and researching content changes, based on reader research and your own professional knowledge in No. 2.)

No matter how good your ideas are and no matter how much useful information you gather from readers, if you don’t have the staff or computer software or press capabilities to carry out your plans, you are no better off than you were before. To state the obvious: you can only do what you can do.

So it is important to assess the state of your personnel, processes, and equipment. Can you afford to make improvements anywhere? This could involve training for current staff, new software packages, new deadlines or production schedule, and so on.

For example, you may decide you would like more information graphics and maps (good idea!). You may need some new software, training for current staff, or new or different staff to pull it off. Or you may decide that you want to upgrade your web site from static HTML to a CMS, such as Drupal or Joomla. Again, you would have to decide which is the best way to go with staff (the software will be free).

Look over your deadline schedule, beginning with when the last ad is accepted. Can it be moved forward – without ticking off too many advertisers – to give the newsroom and production staff a little more time to prepare the final product? Remember: it’s that final product that makes all the difference in ad sales and circulation numbers, so do what you can to optimize its content and presentation.

Finally: equipment. Do you have everything you need to make the improvements you desire? How about cheap digital cameras with video capability for your reporters? Maybe a high-end work station for processing the visual material? What about some improvements in the pre-press or even press operations?

On this last note, by the way, I have found that when I do design consulting, it is critical to talk to the pressroom people. I make sure they understand the total picture and how important it is that they help produce the best possible newspaper. Ultimately, if they don’t get on board and take pride in the final product, much of your other work will be wasted.

This process may bring you back to Step 1, in which you decided the scope of the redesign project and whether to use an outside consultant. That’s fine: it’s an iterative process. You have to find the size project that’s best for you and your paper. Sometimes it’s a big project, and sometimes it’s a touch-up.

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My guess is that it’s time for a redesign of your newspaper. Or at least a freshening.

It used to be that newspapers would go five to eight years between redesigns, but with increased competition and fading circulation numbers, it pays to touch up or change totally more frequently. Today redesigns are often tied to a reduction (again) in web size or a complete change to a tab format.

So you are probably eager to get started and yet boggled at the same time at the daunting process facing you.

It’s not as bad as you might think if you get organized from the get-go, and I’m here to help. During the next month, I’ll put up some posts with my suggestions on how to go about it. It should make the process easier.

The first two big decisions you will need to make are (1) the scope of the project and (2) whether you want a consultant to help.

You may feel a bit reluctant to embark on a total redesign, but unless you have redesigned within the past two years, I recommend you go ahead and re-think your total product line, meaning your web site(s), too. The marketplace will reward improved content in a bright new package, whereas just a freshening might not create the change you want and need. This is a time to be bold.

As for a consultant, I am sure your initial reaction is: TOO MUCH MONEY. Well, the big names in the field are indeed expensive, but you can find some very good consultants at quite reasonable fees. I think they play an important role, especially when you consider the importance of the project and the staff time it will save your paper.

Plus, you can use many consultants as much or as little as you choose — they don’t have to do an entire 6-month project for you. Instead, you can hire the consultant to go over your ideas and work with you along the way as an adviser to keep you from tripping over something. You are doing the redesign, but you bounce ideas off the consultant.

This way you get the benefit of the consultant without having to commit to “full price.” I do recommend that you make at least minimal use of a consultant. All redesign projects benefit from a pair of “fresh eyes.”

Let me know if I can help you in any way.

bob@newsdesignschool.com

P.S. Why not take advantage of my $50 off, special issue video critique offer? That is a great way to kick off a redesign project. E-mail me for more.