Inspecting the furniture
Now that it's had a working week to settle, here are a few thoughts on the new Guardian redesign. Brace yourself, there's a lot to get through.
In general, it's now far and away the best-designed national newspaper. I've even got used to the new masthead. It's a good size, too.
But others have spoken with plenty eloquence about how the whole house looks and feels. Me, I'm going to concentrate on the fittings. The page furniture and navigation have been well-thought out throughout, though for me there's a few bits that could do with improving (I'm not a designer, of course. I'm an editor, and a magazine editor at that; but this does at least mean full colour's nothing new to me. Did I mention we had Mark Porter, the man behind this redesign, in our mag a few years back, discussing the future of newspaper design? I might try to fish that piece out and upload it, if you fancy a squiz).
Anyway. Let's start with something really picky. The actual name of the newspaper, and how it's used, where. It's 'the Guardian' in body copy, 'theguardian' in the masthead and repetitions thereof, 'The Guardian' on the top of each page (presumably because it's the start of the sentence), while the website remains 'Guardian Unlimited'. The sections are still called 'SocietyGuardian', 'MediaGuardian' and so forth, although not in their mastheads.
This confusion carries over into the way the webpages are written, eg. www.EducationGuardian.co.uk, though the homepage isn't www.theguardian.co.uk, nor written www.Guardian.co.uk. Email addresses are usually lower.case@guardian.co.uk, except sometimes they're not (Technology, I'm looking at you). All in all, a capital confusion. I can see why 'the guardian' in body copy could cause confusion, as titles of newspapers aren't italicised in their style guide. 'theguardian' would lead to very easy mockery, and probably the nickname 'theg'. I say, call it 'The Guardian', and the sections 'Something Guardian', with the URLs all lower case, like they should be. That, or scrap the whole thing and call it Fred.
Page numbers next (thrilling, isn't it?). Top of the page for the main paper, with date spelt out (like newspapers), bottom of the page for G2, with date in numbers (like magazines). Faint in the main paper, bold in G2. Not sure why that is, but it's not offensive. Just a little odd.
Now to the navigation. This newspaper is more arrow-filled than an American Indian voodoo doll. Or perhaps that should be chevron-filled; all those close brackets are enough to make html coders wake up in sweats. On the whole, they work well - always in doubles, pointing in orange to things in the paper (yellow being too faint), nice clean cyan to webpages. They sometimes point backwards, too - a great recognition of how people read the paper. Everyone turns to their favourite section first - and may have missed something early on, in this case a theatre review on page three.
There's a sell on the top of pretty much every page - which is a great idea. The challenge of course is to keep that going, and already some sections seem to be struggling. The good intentions of updates from the UN Summit promised in Wednesday's paper weren't anywhere to be seen on the homepage for most of that day. And sometimes, the web sell is identical to the one in the story, so you get a feeling of unnecessary, and slightly disappointing, repetition.
Sells (non-hyperlinks? inactive links? suggestions?) occur elsewhere, in the neat thin gaps left in the spaces where the ad grid ends and the paper grid picks up again. A great solution to a potentially tricky problem, and lovely dingbats in white highlight the top of each one, though for me sometimes these have a danger of being too wordy. And they need punctuation at the end, or a colour distinction between description and where to find it - otherwise it can be clumsy to read, as here or here
While we're on the subject of links, the front page is filled with them. It is obviously web inspired. But for me, there's too much of it. Yes, the front page is supposed to lead you to other things in the paper. But also, the front page is where newspapers differ from other media (webpages, magazines, etc). It's a space that can hold self-contained content. There are 13 "go there"s on today's front page. It would be nice if just one of the stories were self-contained on the front.
Or, even better, Column Five. I love the idea of Column Five. But I want more. Rather than continue on column four inside, and using it solely as a space for whichever opinion piece seems most news-relevant at the time, why not use it entirely for self-contained comment? Of course its length changes every day, depending on corner ads, big pictures, and so on. But that could be its joy. Carefully crafted comment to fit. Economy of space can lead to some loss of depth, but can also focus the mind wonderfully. Get your style in fast, no messing around. More the length of an average blog post, in fact (except by real writers, obviously). Having lots of links is great, but for pace reasons, and for pleasant reading if you can't open the paper on the train, why not have something well written and self-contained on the front page?
Now to the contents box. This is one of my real personal bugbears about the new Guardian. I could be very wrong about this, but bear with me. Links, as I've said, are good. They suggest a paper with a lot more to read than you otherwise might. They take you to different parts of the paper, in a clever, neat way. The contents page does it well in words - it's the only place in news where short, witty headlines (two-word ones in fact) exist. But in images, it's a mess. The problem is that the images it uses, although relevant to the topic, in no way reflect the visuals of the page they refer to. Sam West here looks earnest. Here he looks drawn.
But people, you could argue, aren't idiots. They see the name on the contents. They see the name on the page. They can draw their own conclusions; the images here are for illustration only, to brighten up the page.
However, the images do a lot more than that, whether you like it or not. The problem isn't so major if the reader goes directly to the page straightaway, as bidden. Most times, however, the links will work more subtly. Not many people will interrupt the way they normally read a newspaper, just to turn to an article they see in the contents (unless it's an especially pertinent one to themselves). Instead, they'll look at the picture on page two, or perhaps the top of the front page, think 'hey, that's interesting', and make a mental note to look out for it when it appears.
A visual trigger is much more effective, and more memorable, than a written one. So it should follow that the image on the sell is a crop of the same image, or at least recognisably similar, to that on the page itself. It'd be cheaper that way, too - no need to buy in a new pic. It may not be as visually liberating, but this is about navigation, and it has an important job to do. The front cover of film was equally guilty.
The worst example was on Wednesday's front page. See that rat? When you get to the page, a rat appears, certainly - but only on another sell. Although it is in fact also relevant to the article above it, you feel cheated on some level. You followed the visual trail, and it led to a dead end. The subliminal messages are confusing.
In a separate navigational topic, news and science have experimented with links too, this time using colour within the article: 'footnotes'. Now, I'm a footnote fan myself (DFW, that's your fault), but in this context it just doesn't work. It feels like a school reading book, explaining difficult words. I can see why they did it. But it didn't work. And not only because the Footnotes, unlike, say, footnotes, don't appear in either piece in the order in which they appear in the text (as always, blame it on the subs).
Elsewhere, the daily supplements, pretty much without exception, need a magazine designer to give them a starting push with some big feature layouts. For now, they feel still a bit boxy, like the old Grauniad except with more colour. They'll be nice when Mark and his team have the time to spend on them.
Oh, and not relevant to UKers, but the international edition is now a grey soup of vagueness, due to the pics not being converted to greyscale. But I suspect that there aren't enough readers for that to matter too much.
Enough. A quick list of a few fantastic things, so that my occasional employers don't get the hump: lovely, lovely photos, especially the double-page Eyewitness; lovely, lovely five-column juicy goodness (they're almost to the millimetre the same width as those in the New Yorker, which makes for good reading pleasure. Coincidence?); neat justification trickery - justified right edge to show fact, ragged for comment; good use of mini images with quotes, and sometimes numbers too; it is, let's face it, an ad seller's dream, though often the ads really dominate the page. And perhaps the ad sellers should have thought more about the placement of this one; lovely sprinkling of colour, with restraint but care (though red sends the wrong signals in this context; red subliminally means bad, not good); weekly infographics are a lovely idea (though hopefully they won't be as weird as this Business one); the Business section is particularly well designed, from its smart header in; vertical format means nice pic crops; G2 is now an often-gorgeous magazine on newsprint; two pages of full-colour obits!
As if I was ever going to let that last change pass without comment. And as soon as I get hold of a copy of Nev Brody's new Times2, I'll dissect that with a sharpened toothpick as well.
But first I need to lie down for a while.