Reimagining the Daily Herald
Edit 376: Print Media Design
This was the first phase of what turned out to be a two-part project for Susan Mango Curtis’ Print Media Design class (part two). 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.
For my redesign, then, I designed a Daily Herald Berliner-sized (i.e., 12.5” x 18.5”, 3” less deep than a 50” broadsheet) commuter edition, which would jump out from the newsstand and be easier to read while standing.
Depicted at the right are two pages: at the top, the spec design for my project; and at the bottom, the current Daily Herald front page design, circa April 7, 2006, a standard-sized 50” broadsheet.
The design philosophy I wrote for the project follows below.
101,000 commuters in the Daily Herald’s coverage area (ZIP code blocks 600, 601 and 605, roughly) ride mass transportation to work. Of these, 92 percent spend more than 30 minutes in their commute, and 62 percent spend more than 60 minutes. The Daily Herald is not reaching these readers, due to the bulky format of a broadsheet newspaper.
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 a 50-inch broadsheet versus a Berliner are nearly indistinguishable — 12” x 21” and 12.4” x 18.5” — 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 edition 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. Eventually, a Berliner-sized edition could become the only format of the Daily Herald, because, as Mario Garcia notes (PDF), almost no readership surveys prefer broadsheets to smaller formats.
So I approached the task of redesigning the Daily Herald as a challenge: How could I make the front page most useful to readers, both in terms of format and in terms of content?
First, I redesigned the flag, mostly to eliminate the confusion of the current flag, with its mysterious ‘ra’ ligature. Also, I conducted an informal survey and determined that, like many other Chicago-isms (“The Jewel,” or “The Sun-Times), the newspaper is known as “The Daily Herald;” it’s hard to change a newspaper’s brand, but I believe it makes sense for a newspaper to acknowledge what its readers call it. The flag is as large as the original flag, but it actually strengthens the newspaper’s brand by standing with much more whitespace than the original.
Then, I settled on a new format for the front page that would be most useful to commuters: One central local 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. I added an optional F.Y.I. rail, designed to help readers through their day.
I used the original Daily Herald blue, but added a new, slightly less saturated red, and a burnt red and an orange as well, for their 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 centerpiece, one of the biggest local stories of the past two weeks, is the FDA’s order to an organ-donation firm suspected of stealing New York cadavers’ tissues and spreading them across the country illegally; this is a story without art, but I thought that the headline alone, plus a fictitious pull quote from Rod Blagojevich, would make the page strong enough on its own. There are a handful of national stories — Alberto Gonzales’ defense of the NSA wiretapping program, a new McHenry County water plan, and the Arthur Butz controversy at Northwestern — and some sports scores in the minute rail, and in the Talk of the Town bar, I placed some Olympics results with two international stories (Guantánamo and Haiti) and a story about the heart attack of the man who Dick Cheney accidentally shot. These are the most important stories of the day, and I think it’s useful for their readers to know them. The skybox teases to a sports story, a feature I envisioned about the personality-driven Super Bowl match-up between two star running backs.
My last addition was the F.Y.I. rail, which details a snow warning and parking alerts for affected suburbs. What reader wouldn’t want to know if they’re going to have to park their car somewhere else when they get home?