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Media: The next-generation compact is here: over to you, Alan
Independent on Sunday, The, Apr 17, 2005 by Peter Cole
It is unusual for a newspaper to subject itself to a redesign only 18 months after it last went through the experience. And The Independent's launch of the compact revolution in the quality sector of the national newspaper market was the most extreme new look you can offer " a dramatic reduction in size.
The reverberations continue, amplified again over the past week by the redesign and with the guarantee of much more excitement to come when The Guardian joins the revolutionary forces. That paper had a major and, at the time, controversial redesign 20 years ago, when it introduced the much imitated italic/Roman masthead and new ideas about white space. It is a tribute to its robust durability that even as it enters the final months of its life the David Hillman design looks neither tired nor old- fashioned.
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That is one of the challenges of newspaper design. It must be both functional and stylish. It must reflect the character of the paper and not offend the readers. It must look lively two or three years down the line. Except that in the case of the compact Independent that would not have mattered because, as it has turned out, redesign was never far away. The editor, Simon Kelner, was nipping off to Barcelona to talk to design consultant Antoni Cases. The product of his firm's work was revealed last Tuesday when the new version appeared. The paper, said Kelner, was being given a fresh, modern look.
He also used the word 'evolution' for what was happening to his newspaper. That was important. Independent readers may be a growing band of rather radical people, but I doubt they wish to be subscribers to continuous revolution.
According to Ivan Fallon, chief executive of Independent News and Media UK, owners of the Independents, daily and Sunday, the quick design turnaround was the product of the success of the compact launch in September of 2003. Remember, at the time The Independent was being sold in both broadsheet and new compact form. The broadsheet design was retained because the broadsheet was still being published; each night the production journalists were essentially shrinking the broadsheet. This was the challenge of seducing existing readers into the compact, where some familiarity of design helps to reassure.
All that worked, as we know, and The Independent soon grew its sale by around 20 per cent, stopped producing the broadsheet, and sent shock waves through the quality sector of the market. The Times followed on the compact trail. The Guardian is taking a different route, with a slightly-bigger- than-tabloid format, probably early next year.
Fallon says that since the original compact had never been designed it was time to do that. The paper was evolving a design of its own, but it needed to be underpinned. My experience is that readers in general are not into the niceties and details of newspaper design, and while it was thoughtful of Kelner to tell his readers in the launch issue of the redesign that he was using Sun, Whitney and Benton Two typefaces, I doubt that sent ripples through the readership: 'Who would have thought ... Benton in The Indy!'
What readers do care about, as every editor knows from his or her postbag, is the organisation, structure and predictability of the paper. Here Kelner is daring to be bold ... or foolhardy. After more than two decades of the sectionalised broadsheet, moving progressively towards most of those sections being tabloid, Kelner, abetted by Cases and supported by Fallon, decided to damn the stream and reverse its flow. Apart from the single daily themed sections, such as Media and Motoring, the revised Independent is a one- section paper. This, I feel sure, will prove more controversial than the use of Whitney.
Although editors always claim that such decisions are supported by market research, they are just as often driven by conventional wisdom, or the desire to define this wisdom. The early letters to the paper reacting to the redesign were from readers regretting they could no longer split up the paper and share out the sections. Kelner bravely published them. Did they represent danger signals, or the inevitable resistance to change by some?
Two things about the (almost) single-section quality paper. It is not mouldbreaking for a tabloid paper to be mono-sectional. They all are. Fallon mentioned the Daily Mail, single- section Monday to Friday, and spoke approvingly of its excellence and the 'flow' of its editorial pages. He should be careful. The enemies of the quality compacts argue that downsizing leads to mid-marketing. Clearly single section is the current mid-market structure. But position in the upmarket/downmarket spectrum is dictated not by structure but by the words you put in it.
Secondly, a fat single-section newspaper, with as many as 100 or so pages carrying news from home and abroad, opinion, business and sport, not to mention all the features and listings that used to be found in the second section, needs to provide plenty of clear signposting to guide the reader around the paper. Nothing frustrates more than to spend what seems like five minutes turning over the pages searching for TV times. More could be done in this area, but new designs always take a bit of time to settle down. I expect more work will be done on the back page where the panel of news digest and other key pointers seems rather slight and unconvincing.
