Last week we unveiled our print edition redesign.
We’ve got a new nameplate — our “logo” at the top of the front page — along with new formatting for just about everything else. We changed our design for a few reasons. For one, we didn’t like our old nameplate. It took up too much space and looked a little outdated. With our new nameplate, we can have five teasers on top of the paper. This means you’ll see at six different stories without even unfolding the paper.
One of the biggest changes is the back page. Instead of sports, you’ll find the newly-created USM Community Page. It’s the destination for USM-held events, highlights from the community and a featured student group. This week you’ll learn about the Arts and Crafts Club and Student Government Association elections. USM has a very active community. Different parts may feel separate, but this page will bring them together.
As for the overall changes, you may notice a lot of the restyled formatting. We changed the headline typeface to a sans serif — Helvetic Neue condensed bold. We also changed nearly all of the other fonts, besides the regular story text. We did shrink the body text by half a point. We felt our font was a little too large. The smaller font allows us to fit more text, since we also widened our margins to make reading the text easier. Our pages look less cramped now.
A lot of the changes were made to improve the experience of reading The Free Press. With universal styles throughout the different sections, you’ll be able to identify what is what more easily.
We think this is a big step forward for us and our readers. We hope you enjoy the new look.
If you have any feedback, send me an email at [email protected].