Globe&Mail Re-design reaction on NewsDesigner.com

Can't say I was totally blown away with the new design. Seems a few others aren't either... read on.

Newsdesigner.com | Globe and Mail Redesigns

Posted by: Joan Smyth at April 23, 2007 10:04 AM

While these pages look great in thumbnail, when you're holding the paper it looks incredibly disappointing.

The trim of the paper is good but the overuse of lines makes the entire thing look grey. Rather than looking modern, the paper looks rather retro--like something the Post would have put out had it been published in the early 80s. Or maybe the Globe's trying to mimic websites circa 1999.

The plethora of typefaces, lack of discernable headlines and over-reliance on lines--presumably to hide the basic design rules they're trying, unsucessfully, to break--make most of the paper look like a jumbled mess. The ragged type with the smaller column size makes reading stories difficult. Despite the smaller paper, the text looks more dense and cramped.

It's hard to read more than a few graphs in without being distracted or pulled away by a competing deck or psuedo-headline. Also, the breaks in the middle of the story that give statistics or sidebar information break the flow of the text.

And speaking of white space? What white space? With the exception of the pages shown here, there wasn't a cubic millimetre of whitespace to be found in the entire paper.

Did the quality of the paper or printing go down on this redesign? Because the photos look very muddy.

That being said, I think the redesign could be improved with tweaking. Use fewer decks. Nix the vertical lines and pump the headlines back up. Reduce the number of tyepfaces used and stop trying to cram so much on every single page.

Blogged with Flock