AJC redesign: Your thoughts?
April 28, 2009 at 11:41 am by Scott Henry in News
Well, Julia Wallace and her dwindling crew have finally unveiled their kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamline baby, the redesigned print AJC. Hmm. Since every change as radical as this requires a period of emotional adjustment, I’ll stick mostly to random observations:
1) I’d been told the paper was planning to use fewer large photos, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major daily apart from the Wall Street Journal that doesn’t have at least one two-column photo above the front-page fold. That’s pretty radical.
2) Moving the table of contents and front-page briefs column out of the left-hand gutter and into the middle of the page is, well, just plain weird. I understand why they did it — it enables them to run two sets of headlines just under the section banner without “bumping heads,” a no-no in newspaper design. But it still feels weird.
3) The Community News page seems more readable now; it’s easier to spot individual communities. But I’ve wondered for a while now, Do people read this page?
4) I can’t help but worry that the reader-driven push for “clearer headlines” and subheds — and sub-subheds — is because many people would like to be able to skim off kernels of information without actually going to the trouble of reading the articles. Isn’t that why God created local TV news?
5) What’s with the promise of “More optimistic, positive stories” in the Living section? Simply having a lifestyle section filled with fluff wasn’t good enough? Now it’s gotta be feel-good fluff? What’s next, treating each issue with a light dusting of Xanax?
Anyway, what does anyone else think of the new redesign? And, please, keep it decent.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Perhaps too little too late, but it does grab the attention as a somewhat more attractive cover. Have you ever heard of Jacek Utko? Check this out: http://tinyurl.com/cywex3. Brilliant approach to make newspaper more approachable and interesting by bringing in the designers early in the process to produce great imagery and alternative layout design.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Does anybody still buy the paper? I wouldn’t know about the redesign if I didn’t read this blog.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
Instead of the earlier noted mention that the cover is now more attractive, I might change that to more engaging. Aesthetically, it does not do it for me. The branding masthead is too large, and I agree that the contents strip should remain in sidebar or applied as a footer. It sets in too valuable of real estate and does not command its space.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
if they start dusting the Living section with Xanax, i’ll get a subscription
April 28th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
At first, second and third glances, I don’t like this new AJC. But I’ve disliked other changes in the hometown paper, and grew to accept and perhaps even like some of them. I will wait to see if that happens this time.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I think the design is workable, and the paper’s about an inch narrower (saving Cox some $ on newsprint). What’s worrysome is the severe right-turn the paper’s making on its editorial pages. Everything today with the exception of half the “Yes/No” opinion was conservative. Looks like rumors that the AJC was going to sell Ralph McGill and Cynthia Tucker’s soul to try and get right-wing readership were true.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Hard to say without picking one up, but my impression from the screenshots and PDFs is the thick blue letters on the masthead is a little irritating, but the rest looks like it at least has the potential to be an improvement.
It would help if they had more content worth reading.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
It looks a little like the Weekly Shopper.
Then again…
April 28th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I’m sorry, but this completely puts me in the mind of a small-town paper somewhere along the Florida Gulf Coast or something. The Port St. Lucie News…
Seems to me that serious journalism announces itself with a serious presentation. If I wanted hearsay from a “friend,” I don’t need a subscription.
Not at all impressed.
April 28th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Erik,
Actually, this looks very little like any paper in Florida. It does, however, look an awful lot like The Guardian in London, which is about as serious a presentation as you can get.
As a newspaper designer (not in or of Atlanta), it’s interesting to read the feedback on this from readers. A lot of redesigns of North American newspapers in the last 10 years have focused on less type, bigger headlines and bigger photos. This redesign goes in the opposite direction, yet it gets much of the same pushback from readers.
This is a more serious presentation than most metro dailies – more NYT or WSJ with modern typography. There are more stories and words on each page of this newspaper, but people are comparing it to a weekly shopper full of hearsay? Okay…
(And Port St. Lucie is on Florida’s Atlantic coast.)
April 28th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Does all this bagging on the AJC’s attempt to pretty itself up mean you guys are going to stick with the same old unattractive POS look, then?
April 28th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
We all know that, when presenting the news, appearance is everything
April 29th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Each of the five articles on the front page, both yesterday and today, had a jump. SO OBNOXIOUS. Maybe if they didn’t have like 5 subheads on each article they could fit at least one complete one on the page.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Saw a print copy last night. The blue text in the masthead isn’t as obnoxious in newsprint as it looks in PDFs and screenshots, but I still don’t like it.
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:13 pm
To be brief, I don’t like it. It looks cheesy, like a high school science fair billboard. Also, I believe that they have reduced the thickness of the paper.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:24 pm
I’ve been living here 1 1/2 years now and have read the AJC maybe three times. It’s a piece of crap with little to no helpful news for anyone inside of the perimeter. I would buy it if I had a bird that needed something to take a dump on.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:31 am
I looked closely at the Sunday paper, which is the one the AJC really wanted to revamp, and I say: not bad.
Some of the changes will have to grow on me, but I have seen (and read) worse Sunday papers.
May 12th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
It feels and looks like facebook to me.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:25 am
Quoting from Jennifer Griggs
on the Society for News Design Blog site,
posted April 28,2009:
“USA Today circa 1983″
My own comment is that the format
is cheap looking, rather like a shopper,
or a print imitation of a web page.