This is hardly a new idea, but because it is a good one and though I have written about it before, it is worth repeating so more people can consider it.
Poynter tweeted about this yesterday, even though the Swedish publisher spoke about it over a year ago. I suggested the same thing probably five or six years ago.
Newspaper design rests on the premise that each page layout should reflect the content of the page. This paradigm implies an infinite number of page layouts because the content, like a river one steps in, is never the same twice.
Approaching the news of the day this way gives you an almost impossibly hard task. I have always said that you could speed up the process greatly if you created templates for a handful of page designs and then used them in some sort of rotation.
This is what happens in the real world of newspaper work. People who lay out pages tend to repeat four or five designs week after week with only slight adjustments for content differences.
Do you really think the Average Joe and Joetta care about newspaper design? Do you think anyone would notice if you used the same layout multiple times per month?
If I were running a newspaper today, I would bring in a designer to help me set up my templates, then I would say sayonara and hire another reporter or editor. People want content more than they want well designed newspapers, even though I — obviously — think design is important.
If you need help with your newspaper design or page templates, e-mail me.
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Owner, News Design School
I would contend this has already happened at most average-sized newspapers. We are no longer designers, we are paginators. We can not take hours to design a cover … we’ve got 45 minutes at the end of the night, after doing 12 other pages, posting to the Web, sending breaking news e-mails and texts, and editing, and in some cases, writing the stories. We have sports reporters doing sports pages from 7 layouts created for them because they’re not designers. Never wanted to be, but forced into it by furloughs and layoffs. Makes me want to run screaming from the building, leaving shredded sports pages in my wake.
I’ve got to disagree with you on this one.
I think that your notion that the average Joe doesn’t notice newspaper design is a bit assumptive. They may not notice whether or not a publication uses rotating templates, but they can certainly tell when a page layout is visually appealing and when it is boring … even if only subconsciously, a judgement is still being made.
I believe that the idea of layout-driven page design is that story telling is far more effective and enjoyable for the reader when it combines content and layout in a synergetic way that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The fact that people in the real world tend to repeat page designs doesn’t necessarily make it the best process for putting a paper together.
And one of the ideas that was stressed by Margaretha in the Poynter video was that it really isn’t a huge leap for publications to start thinking about page design from a layout-first perspective, regardless of how small the publication may be. It just means change.
Thanks for the food for thought!
Thanks for both thoughtful replies. Heather: It certainly sounds like a frustrating position. It is as if you were trained to be a musician, hired as a musician, then all you do is play CDs for the audience. Is it just Sports that does its own pages?
Matt: In my experience, people notice whether the layout is interesting, but they wouldn’t notice that you also used the same layout last week. Of course it is not the best practice. Most newspapers (see Heather’s comment) don’t have that luxury any more. I think it is definitely worth considering, especially for smaller papers.
Thanks again for your responses.
Unfortunately, they aren’t the only ones. I do our “Community” section for Sunday (our publisher’s brilliant idea instead of Features or Life), and 7 of the 8 pages are formatted templates. It looks the same every weekend. Thank God I get to do the cover my way … they even let me pick different headline fonts.
They’ve also restricted us to a five-column grid on A1. If we’ve got a big project, we have been given clearance to forget it … but 6 of 7 days I could tell you what the front will look like. Stripped story across the top. 4 column cp in a double rule box. 1 story down the side. One story stripped across the bottom.
And that’s the way they want it … they say it’s consistent. I say it’s boring.
You can tell the difference on the news stand, though. On days our biggest competitor has a great A1, they sell out. And piles of our paper sit there, waiting for the bottom of a bird cage.
Heather: Wow. That sounds awful. Seems like they would learn a lesson from the rack sales, but newspapers didn’t reach their current state because people thought about anything….