Redesign Day 4: Losing my religion

I started working in newspapers in the UK in 1996 at the tender age of 24. I began at a company in South Wales as a sub-editor, or copy-editor as they're called here in the States, and after a year on the subs' desk I moved to design. The papers I worked for were (and still are) tabloids, and I quickly came to love tabloid design - the use of colour, the bold and brash headlines, big photos, cutouts, puns - it was fun, fun to design and fun to look at. Our front pages stood out when compared to the staid broadsheets, something I was proud of. From there I moved to another tabloid (and by "move" I mean I shifted about 30 feet from my old desk - the papers were owned by the same company and based in the same building) where the design was even more fun. Led by an incredibly talented art director, we used more colours and more cutouts and more page furniture.  Better yet, we had more interesting stories and features which inspired us to do them justice by making the paper scream "READ ME!" at people. Oh, and pun headlines. Lots and lots of pun headlines. I turned into quite a design snob. Broadsheets were stuffy, boring and dull, serif fonts were for old people, and if you didn't have at least three cutouts per page then you didn't know what you were doing. In 2004 I moved to America and discovered the word "tabloid" fills the average American journalist with horror. "Tabloid" in the States conjours up images of the Weekly World News, or The National Enquirer, or any other number of trashy magazines and "newspapers"*. I tried explaining that there's a world of difference between tabloid content and tabloid design but I don't think I got anywhere. After getting a job at TCN I quickly had to unlearn a lot of stuff and get my head around designing what I'd believed for eight years to be the antithesis of page layout and design, and in the process I discovered something. Broadsheet design isn't that bad. The challenge changed from making the papers appealing by having huge headlines, photos, cutouts and colours to making them appealing by not having huge headlines, photos, cutouts and colours. My design philosophy changed from one of "make it look like an explosion in a darkroom" to "make it look clean, classy, and above all, quality". Now I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, "What is this Limey on about?" I suppose what I'm trying to say is that during the first week or so of redesigning the News-Press I've realised that not only has my design philosophy changed, so has my desire to make the paper as brash as I once wanted to. I don't think that design would work in America, and certainly not on a major metropolitan paper, and even if it did I wouldn't want to do it. So no matter what Glendale's paper ends up looking like, rest assured it will do a fine job of representing the Jewel City. * The Star is probably the best example of what a trashy UK tabloid is like. All major British newspapers are now tabloids, not because they all suddenly lost IQ points but because the smaller size is a lot easier to read on public transport.