Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Monday, April 23, 2007

Facelift Disaster

The redesigned Globe and Mail caught my eye this morning, so I picked up a copy (see it here). Enthusiasm quickly turned to disappointment and then horror as it became clear that instead of redesigning the paper, they'd de-designed it.

The page layout and design has been one of the Globe's strengths since their last redesign several years ago. Instead of building on that, the new look throws out the good and replaces it with an uncomfortable mating of National Post with Toronto Star Sunday Edition .... using the worst of both. The layout is messy and reminds you of unfocused paper layouts of the 1980s.

Perhaps the root of the problem is that this was an in-house job. In-house redesigns can become disasters because the people doing the work are just too connected with their organization's culture and politics. It takes an outsider to be able to take a more objective view and make hard decisions.

Here's a list of the bad:

Ideas
In the end, it all comes down to ideas. The in-house designers who came up with this didn't seem to have many. Or, more likely, they had competing ideas and the result was a design where all the good was dumped. The ideas that survived -- and there aren't amny of them -- are weak and don't serve a 163-year-old national newspaper.

Nameplate & Banner
Created a couple of redesigns ago, the nameplate clashes with the new design.

Bars, bars, bars
The new design consists mostly of plugging thick black bars all over the place. And dotted lines. And thin lines. And grey bars. The previous layout was distinctive ... this looks cheap.

Heading font
The custom Globe & Mail sans font apes the headline font used by the Sunday Star. And not very well. Font weights and styles are all over the place .... instead of coming up with some rules before the launch, they appear to be test-driving the fonts live.

Paper
A comment at Newsdesigner.com asks if the paper quality has changed. It seems to be smoother and lighter ... but difficult to tell if it's cheaper. It might just feel cheap because the layout looks cheap.

The Bottom Line:
I get my news online, like more and more people these days. I think of the paper newspaper as a luxury item to relax with a couple of times a week, especially on the weekends. Reading the newspaper -- the paper version -- is pleasurable and good design is part of that experience. I'm less likely to pick up the Globe if it looks ugly ... and this new design is ugly. And I don't want it in my home.

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