Anatomy of a redesign

Or, ‘what I’m thinking when I say that Bitstream is a crappy typeface’

NOTE: This is an unpublished piece I found thanks to Gareth Evans. I produced it to sell the old administration on my redesign. It worked, but nobody got to see it. Now I’m releasing it to the public for the first time.

I’m new to this.

I don’t know if I’m good at it, either. I’d say that you were ‘literate’ in something (code literate, design literate, etc) the moment that you could critique professional level work. And I’m definitely design literate. There are lots of days I wake up, look at something, and go “christ, somebody got paid to make that? I could’ve put that together.” Sure, design is fairly subjective, but definitely not entirely so.

Still, maybe writing down the notes of the gair rhydd redesign will help me get better in time. There’s just as good of a chance that I’ll look back at this in a few years and view myself as terribly amateurish, of course, but this will be worth something even when that day hits.

Preface

gair rhydd needs a fresh lick of paint. There, I’ve said it.

I don’t necessarily mean this in terms of design, either. We need to look at approaching the student body differently as opposed to us sitting in our office and declaring that one arbitrary concept is what students want as opposed to another equally arbitrary concept. That is to say: the ‘it’s good enough for me’ mentality has to go. We have to start asking ourselves whether or not things are good enough for students. Of course, we think what we publish is good enough. We’ve always thought that. But how frequently do we sit down and actually think about it?

I don’t know how I can implement something like that, or lobby for any sort of change. But I’m a competent designer, so maybe that’s a start. A fresh lick of paint can — and should — represent a fresh start. I don’t mean that we should turn our backs on the newspaper’s great history; rather, I believe that we should declare a fresh start in the eyes of those who thought that gair rhydd was beneath them in the past. The most common criticisms I heard this year were that the newspaper was rife with typos and that it looked messy. We can fix that. As someone who thought that gair rhydd was beneath me in the past, I know we can.

And it’s relatively simple, too. In terms of the former, there’s a goddamn spellchecker in InDesign (the software we use to produce pages), but nobody was trained how to use it. So let’s train people better. In terms of the latter — that the newspaper looked messy — I don’t think any amount of ‘freshening up’ what we have will change the way people think about that. Times New Roman is not a horrible font, but it makes for an underwhelming masthead. People have grown too reliant on changing the tracking (space between letters and words) to pad out pieces as opposed to subbing them with any effort. There aren’t even any templates set up, so bad design lasts for as long as people copy and paste the same templates from issue to issue, resulting in a veritable pile of bullshit.

My ideas below are a little half baked in places, but they come from the right place. I want to see students attribute more value to gair rhydd than they do to the Metro, and, hell, to attribute more value to Quench than they do to Stylist or Shortlist. It’s possible, so let’s get started:

The need for a prominent sans-serif typeface

A sans-serif typeface is a typeface without serifs — the little curly bits on the ends of Times New Roman that make it look different to Helvetica. We already use one in gair rhydd called Franklin Gothic Bold. It’s certainly not awful; it’s storied and used by a variety of organisations, up to and including the Museum of Modern Art.

But it’s not foregrounded nearly enough, and I don’t know if it’s the right ‘fit’ for the rest of the newspaper, particularly for small type such as notes on images. So I propose the veritable (and, by modern standards, perhaps underwhelmingly titled) Akzidenz-Grotesk:

We have all of the above weights on our system, as well as some more. The extended weights don’t look that nice, in my opinion, but the condensed ones look great, and the standard weights (regular, medium, etc) are appropriate for nearly everything we’d need to do.

It’s old, too. Akzidenz-Grotesk is, to my knowledge, one of the oldest sans-serif typefaces still in use. It’s nowhere near as old as its serif counsins (Garamond is about half a millennium old, and it’s installed on Windows PCs as standard and is used by The Spectator and others extensively), but it was designed in the 1800s and since then it’s undergone constant iterations and revisions. Note: this is a really good reason you shouldn’t use free fonts, because often they’re produced by amateurs and they lack the same level of polish that comes with using one produced by a foundry like Linotype or Monotype. /jargon

Most importantly, it goes very well with our chosen serif font. I feel like any further discussion needs to take place in context for it to be worth much. So, without further ado…

Introducing Warnock Pro

I’m not going to lie. When Tom said he was willing to use Warnock Pro, sans the ligatures, for gair rhydd, I was very pleased. I’m a big fan of the typeface, and have been for a long time. It’s stylish, it prints well (previous iterations of gair rhydd and Quench have used webfonts in their print versions, and it looks really terrible), and it’s severely underused. Check this bad boy out:

That’s the standard weight; there are, of course, bold and italic versions of the typeface.

So why Warnock? Outside of the above ‘it’s stylish’ and so on, it’s important to clarify that this is more than just personal preference. When paired with a strong sans typeface such as Akzidenz, Warnock remains strong and keeps its character. It’s a lot more open than its brothers, so it doesn’t look stuffy, but it’s also not a joke typeface either. We could use a heavy-ass blackletter typeface, sure, but I don’t know if that would appeal to our audience. Warnock, though, ticks every box — it’s practical, it’s friendly, but it doesn’t fuck around.

It’s also got full Opentype support. For those outside of the same jargon-spewing bubble I live in, that means it supports a huge range of glyphs, including many in other languages. What I’m trying to say is that Welsh language articles are Warnock friendly, because Warnock’s friendly to some of the accented characters in the Welsh language. There’s even some Chinese / Cyrillic support in there, so Warnock truly is a typeface for everybody, like the Students’ Union.

I want to stress that I’m most interested in Akzidenz’s condensed iterations, and Warnock looks bloody great when paired with a condensed sans type — check out the Quench awards supplement, where I paired it with Futura Condensed. They looked fab in conjunction.

In practice

So how would the newspaper look with Warnock and Akzidenz grafted on to the current design? Terrible, probably. I didn’t really try, because the current newspaper was designed for a different set of typefaces.

Instead, I started from scratch. I came up with some fairly radical redesigns. My initial intent was to foreground them all here, but many of them weren’t that strong. They were, at least, interesting. I had about a four hour conversation with GR columnist Gareth Evans about this one, for example:

There were aspects of it I liked, and to be clear, the experimentation was valuable. But I wanted something more than an experiment. So, born of a few ideas I’d been kicking around since I first worked on Quench and some influence (and deterrence) from the practice of some other student newspapers, I’ve come up with this:

Named after my prime inspiration, the Diamondback, I’m referring to this one as ‘DBK’.

Here are two variants — one for a busy news week, and one for when we need to pay tribute.

It’s a draft — I’m still up in the air about sans-serif titles — but it’s also a good starting point to talk about some of the things I liked / disliked about the old GR front page. You know, this one:

As you can see when you compare the two, the sidebar of shame is gone. This has been replaced with an Independent-style cluster of topics next to the masthead in the top right hand corner. The masthead now has more support as a result, no longer floating on its own, and our mascot remains intact.

There’s also much more text on the front page, because we’re a newspaper, and we’re not messing around about that any more. The banner at the bottom of the page can be sold as ad space if there’s nothing that interesting on offer, or it can be used to foreground something important inside of the newspaper, as I did above with lacrosse.

Everything else is about the cover story. We should not go: “what happens when there’s a slow news week?” Rather, we should be saying: “Let’s never have a slow news week.” With the latter mentality in mind, we should bet all our chips on the story of the week, because what value is there in a front page unless we do?

This eases some of my irritations with regards to ‘boxed in’ front pages, where the front page article is almost framed by other nonsense. Here’s how much real estate we gave the scandal of the week (red):

And people called Quench the pamphlet!

This redesign was inspired by The Diamondback, which is, in my opinion, the greatest looking student newspaper in the world (it’s from the University of Maryland, fyi):

Look how bloody good it looks! And it’s daily, too!

Of course, The Diamondback is a broadsheet, and we’re a tabloid, so my design is much more squat. But I won’t shy away from my prime influence, just as I didn’t with Quench and EDGE (dem folios m8). There’s also some TIME and (perhaps to my shame) a little bit of Buzzfeed in there.

Why get rid of the sidebar?

Beyond the fact that it looks like the Daily Mail sidebar?

I played about with it for a little while after identifying a few key problems. Specifically, that the grey fades really quickly in print and that we have no real cohesive style right now. The text is all over the place across issues and the space between the boxes is often less than equal. Grey and white just don’t go together, either — And Franklin is a great font, but it needs more support to work in a space like that. Beyond making the typeface huge, I’m not too sure what to do.

Really, though, the side-column thing we’ve been using boxes in the front page story as I described above. It’d be fine if it was another story, but three or four random opi pieces just kind of devalues the whole affair. Perhaps if our masthead was more condensed like one of the red tops then it would work, but I kind of like the masthead being in its own demarcated space.

And what about changing the masthead?

We don’t have the finality of the mural outside of our office any more, and as long as we keep that dragon, we’re all happy, I think.

Let’s talk about the new one first. Here it is in context:

And here it is alone:

Compare this to the previous masthead:

At first, I approached the masthead with an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” approach, but there are a couple of things that made me u-turn on that philosophy.

For one, we are not going to use Times New Roman at any point in the newspaper, which means this is purely a logo thing. But it’s bland, and I’ve always felt like the italic ‘gair’ made it look a little bit sarcastic. My hope was that we’d be able to keep the newspaper down to two typefaces used in total, because a — that’s what most others do, and b — it’s considered good practice to never go over three.

Of course, the Daily Mail and Express etc sometimes just use a typeface solely for their masthead, but they look hella old, and I don’t feel like Times New Roman complements Warnock very well. They look too similar for there to be a strong contrast, which means to keep both we’d have to keep Warnock out of headlines, and I’m not too sure that’s something we’d want to do.

In approaching the new masthead, I wanted something that was clean and versatile. Akzidenz-Grotesk is clearly grid based, which means that if we have need to fit our logo around something, we can approach it fairly logically as opposed to just aesthetically. There’s also hundreds of other student newspapers with the same old blasé serif masthead out there.

Tom said to me that people looked at Quench and went “christ, these guys know how to use InDesign” at the SPA national conference this year. I want people to say that when they see gair rhydd. I think they need to see something significantly different, though — not necessarily unlike a newspaper, but something that breaks from the tropes they’ve been following forever.

I think the Akzidenz-Grotesk masthead does that. We keep our mascot, and with that, our heritage, but we gain a newer, cleaner look. This new way of presenting the newspaper is about the future (despite Akzidenz being over a century old) as opposed to the past — it’s a clean break.

Other nitty gritty details

A number of people have suggested we re-tool the way we present contributors — getting rid of dumbass titles like “news writer” and so on — which is a great idea. We’ve also had a lot of feedback about the number of stock images / google results that sneak into the newspaper, so we’re going to get an image bank put together by the start of the new semester. Picture captions are too bloody small, and they’re in Franklin anyway, so I’ve been thinking something like this might work, as per the Hypercube redesign above, but horizontal:

It obviously depends on context, though. Monocle does a really good job of hiding credits in the gutters, but if we’re just going to highlight what’s going on in the world, then we should probably foreground captions.

Spreadville

The front page is one thing. But what about spreads? Here are some I’ve put together so far, in order of design. (Some big blocks are just placeholders for actual images):

(Re: above: I was going to put folios (i.e. section name and page numbers) down the bars on the left and right).

(remember: blue frames = spaces for images)

Somewhere along the line, I also straightened out the masthead, so I’ll dump that here, too:

Here’s the old one, for side by side comparisons:

Part two of the redesign involved a modular, ten column version (I know you wanted me to scrap the folios, tom — I just didn’t have the time to paste the old ones over). Text now takes up two columns, so is the same size as before. This sounds complex, so first off, here it is in practice:

The news spread above is the cleanest version, but here are some alternative layouts to show how it might work in other sections / with more than one piece per page. Bonus: For and Against redesign!

Here it is with the grids enabled for reference:

There are some features of this redesign I really like. Here’s how I handle authors. It frees up space for a drop cap, and I know you love those, Eden:

Without grids:

And here’s how I handle image captions (akzidenz + warnock):

Pull quotes much the same:

By keeping them in the same column as in the above images, however, it leaves things super tidy! White space also makes large volumes of text seem much less intimidating, too — and has the added bonus of making the paper feel larger. For reference, the Independent does this ten column structure — it’s where I got the idea — and it feels so much bigger than GR even though it’s the same size.

Inspiration

Here are some things I found that I really liked and probably influenced the latter set of spreads above:

The new Independent was obviously a big factor. Check out the way they use columns. (They use 12; in the designs above, I used 10.)

I think this is superb, too:

Anyway!

That’s it from me. Let me know what you think, duders.