Creating “Today”
Edit 376: Print Media Design
This was the second phase of what turned out to be a two-part project for Susan Mango Curtis’ Print Media Design class (part one). We were assigned to redesign the front page of the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago publication.
My goal was to produce a world-class suburban newspaper, and to produce an edition geared toward rail and bus commuters. The Daily Herald’s service area sees a large number of mass transit commuters, the great majority of whom spend at least 30 minutes a day on either the train or the bus. But the current format of the Daily Herald is not conducive to reading on the go; there are two publications that are, however. Those are the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune Co.’s RedEye, a free tab geared to 18- to 30-year-olds.
In addition, Prof. Curtis and I decided in consultation that I should pursue a younger demographic, older than the RedEye’s target and suburban, but still hipper than the current Daily Herald can reach. These readers would be between the ages of 22 and 35, want something interesting and exciting to read, and are probably reading magazines instead right now. They could probably be lured back to newspapers with the right product.
For this phase, then, I designed came up with “Today,” or “T,” a daughter publication of the Daily Herald, which would be a Berliner-sized (i.e., 12.5” x 18.5”, 3” less deep than a 50” broadsheet) commuter-oriented newspaper, which would jump out from the newsstand and be easier to read while standing.
A sample of the front pages and section fronts that I designed are depicted at the right. Several of the sections are worth note: a locally oriented business and feature section, and a more localized sports section than most newspapers carry, with a special focus on Chicago sports.
The design philosophy I wrote for the project follows below.
In 2006, 101,000 commuters in the Daily Herald’s current coverage area (ZIP code blocks 600, 601 and 605, roughly) rode mass transportation to work. Of these, 92 percent spend more than 30 minutes in their commute, and 62 percent spend more than 60 minutes. This population is expected to grow, as the Chicago metropolitan area is expected to reach 10 million people by 2030. If traffic is already untenable, imagine what it will be like with no new highway construction projects on the horizon. It will be crucial for newspapers to find a way to reach out to people who have long commutes on the train, just as the New York City newspapers have done. The Daily Herald is not in a position to reach these readers, due to the bulky format of a broadsheet newspaper. I am not persuaded of a wholesale shift to computer-oriented newspapers, especially in this market, within 15 years.
Let’s step back a moment and consider format. Twenty years ago, before the shift to 50-inch web presses and their smaller physical dimensions, producing a tabloid or Berliner edition meant compromising on the content contained in the newspaper. But the dimensions of today’s 50-inch broadsheet versus a Berliner are nearly indistinguishable — 12”x21” and 12.4”x18.5” — and a newspaper that reads like a book has distinct readership advantages for mass transit riders, both bus and train. This suggested that it would make most sense to produce a commuter-oriented publication for the Daily Herald, a Berliner-sized version specifically intended for mass transit riders. It’s a market that the current Daily Herald isn’t, and can’t, reach. As Mario Garcia notes, almost no readership surveys prefer broadsheets to smaller single-section formats; it isn’t difficult to imagine the Daily Herald’s readers preferring the new format.
So I approached the task of creating a new daughter publication of the Daily Herald with a particular task in mind: How could I make the front page most useful to readers, both in terms of format and in terms of content?
I had to first choose a new name, something that would resonate with new readers and not confuse them about the role of the Daily Herald in the project. After playing with a large variety of names—News Today, Metropolitan, Track, and Rail — I settled on a single-letter title that I thought communicated strongly: Today, or “T.” My initial polling suggested that it’s a name that resonates, especially in a market without any newspaper pushing currency in its title, and it’s short and punchy and lends itself well to strong branding throughout the publication (a must when dealing with newsstand sales).
Then, I settled on a new format for the slightly smaller front page that would be most useful to commuters: One central locally oriented story as a centerpiece, with a minute-read rail (local and national stories, and sports scores), and a bar with a selection of the four news stories readers are most likely to talk about with co-workers during the day. This is, essentially, what I look for in the newspaper each day before work when I’m working 9 to 5; busy readers should find it useful, and these readers are quite busy — but they’re also captive for 30 minutes to an hour each day, on the train. By working on a strict five-column grid, I wanted to leave room for future expansions, like an F.Y.I. rail or a column; having that space available is really crucial to the expansion of elements of the newspaper.
I built the color palette around a bright, cheerful red, less aggressive than RedEye’s but still bright and red, and added the traditional Daily Herald blue, a bright green and blue, and a burnt red and an orange as well, for the color palette. It would be easy to add additional colors, because those are simple color matches. I chose Caledonia, a very readable font with a large x-height and a clear, large italic, to go with Franklin Gothic as the key fonts for the newspaper.
Then, the task was merely to select stories that were important enough to drive readership, and to present themselves as useful to the readers. I ended up with a selection of news stories scattered across the two weeks I worked on the page. The three front-page centerpieces around which I modeled the design are: a potential avian-flu pandemic, imagining several other cities having been hit previously; a preview of the Cubs season; and an imagined reform of the CTA and its finances, which is the sort of thing that is guaranteed to move copies of a commuter-oriented newspaper at the newsstand. Each of the section front pages are designed around that specific goal, and the great strength of newspapers as they reinvent themselves: local news. I’ve created two intensely locally oriented news sections, CityScape and InFocus, a locally oriented business section (The Biz), and imagined a sports section with far less national coverage and a lot of local team coverage, for a market as locally focused as Chicago.