just rambling

my paper’s redesign: a failure of the bilingual policy

When my paper started in June 2006, it was an all-Chinese daily. A year later, it revamped as a bilingual freesheet divided into an English section and Chinese section. On Monday, the paper was revamped again, and taglined as “The Best of Both Worlds” and no long “my life, my thoughts, my say”.The evolution of this three-year old paper seems to mirror the failure of the bilingual policy that MM Lee confessed to last week.

Before this revamp, the paper was equally divided between the two languages, with each fronting a cover. The English section opened from right to left and the Chinese section began from the back page, which interestingly followed how Chinese books are traditionally read, from left to right. In this new design, the Chinese section is now a separate insert while a new Business section takes over the back page.

This seems to reflect the reality of the Singapore readership. An English reader is unlikely to touch the Chinese section and vice versa, so why not make one paper more useful to two different set of readers instead?

To better appeal to English readers, my paper has also added a Business section. As English is the language of commerce here, this section is not available in Chinese. This addition helps it better fight Today, its competitor in the free-sheet business. Till now, the latter had the advantage of providing commercial news. The new design also promises to be more advertiser-friendly (like Today?). But, do we really need another newspaper covering business too?

Today's back page

my paper's back page

Commercially it might make sense, but I’m not sure if it provides diversity or even distinguishes it from the market.

The only distinguishing fact of my paper now is its billingual content. Isn’t that why it now calls itself “The Best Of Both Worlds”?  Not, if you read its revamp advertisements closely. The paper is really trying to bring together “More Business news accentuated with Lifestyle features”.

In fact, how billingual is this paper? It really is two papers in different languages put together. For select stories, there is a Helpdesk, a section attached to provide the translation of words in both languages but do readers really use it? The paper may claim to have had an increased in readership, but it doesn’t say if it’s because of the paper’s bilingual content. Plus, the latest design of the paper — moving the Chinese section to be an insert — further reinforces this idea of two separate papers.

Observing how Chinese has been gradually moved from the paper’s mainstay to become a novelty factor is an indictment of how billingualism has failed here. And, if it’s true that my paper went bilingual upon MM Lee’s suggestion, then it is just a manifestation of the failure of this policy.

Still propaganda, but in a commercial-friendly package

The redesign of Pioneer magazine, the Singapore Armed Forces’ (SAF) publication for public consumption, has, in my opinion, achieved the important goal of reaching out to its audience.

It has done so by mimicking and even blatantly copying the design language (so much for being Pioneer) of “lad mags” such as Stuff Magazine, T3 and Wired. This explains the neon colour palette, diagonal-line background, Web 2.0 typefaces and icons that literally burst out of the pages. Aping a look that is familiar with the magazines its target audience reads is a sure way to stay relevant.

Left is a spread from Stuff Magazine in September 2009, on the right is a page from Pioneer’s August issue.

But beyond it’s self-proclaimed “fresh look” from the August issue, is there really a “new beginning” as it touts? The core content that features the latest happenings in the SAF remains but what has been given a boost in line with its new look is more content pertaining to lifestyle issues.

This lifestyle push plus the “lads mag” mentality has also produced a new section called “The Back Page” which featuresdeserving people who work in the SAF — thus far four women, none dressed in military garb. While it is not stated specifically that only women will be featured, how possible is it that the majority gender has not been able to nominate someone deserving from their own kind? Without a criteria to judge who is considered deserving, and the only common thread thus far is they are all women, one can only conclude there must be a policy to objectify women in the magazine to appeal to its readers.

The redesigned Pioneer magazine definitely looks livelier and more exciting. But with each new issue, I find myself less excited than the last. Under all the bells and whistles, hardly anything has changed since it started 40 years ago, it is still a newsletter of propaganda about our military.

It’s always grey in TODAY

Halfway into the interview, Design Editor Edric Sng suddenly asks (one of many times) for my thoughts  on TODAY’s newspaper design and that is when I fumble. It took me a while, but I remembered another blog’s gripe about how “texty” TODAY looks.

It turns out that the paper is intentionally text-driven, or “grey” for a reason — advertisements. Two-thirds of the newspaper is made up of ads, so rather than compete with ads with colourful visuals that would cut text, Sng says, “It just comes down to the lesser of two evils.” Thus, being grey helps the news to stand out.

Ads play such a big role in this free newspaper’s design because that is its only source of revenue. This is why Sng laughs when he talks about ST’s news design constraints, “You think they have it hard? Nonsense!” he says. Moreover, the paper’s space constraints are further limited by its  tabloid-size, but Sng is clear that ads are why he gets paid.

Why TODAY is still in Times New Roman
When Sng led the three month long redesign of TODAY (he takes another swipe at ST for doing theirs in six) the one thing he was not allowed to change was the nameplate. As a fledgling newspaper, it could not afford to undo the branding work for a paper still trying to establish itself. That aside, everything went out of the door as Sng streamlined a paper too thin for too many different styles. He used just three colours of red, black and grey (business section was blue for marketing reasons) and two styles, one for daily and another for the weekend edition.

The redesign’s three guiding concerns were as follows: space constraints, making day-to-day design “idiot proof” and costs. Only two people led the redesign, Sng and his managing editor, and this he says led to a more coherent redesign than ST’s, which even had its nameplate’s typeface changed a day before launch. “We don’t believe in redesign by committee (like ST)… the problem is a lot of people don’t know what they are saying.” he says.

This lack of visual journalism knowledge here is one reason why Sng is considering lecturing when the opportunity arises. Education is how to improve newspaper design here, he says, especially since Singapore newspaper’s editors are mostly “dinosaurs” who only see journalism as text. Sng thinks at least 30 per cent of stories in today’s papers can be in alternative story formats like infographics, though it is the “hardest damm thing” to do too.

Another reason for the lack of innovation in newspaper design here is the lack of impetus with just two media companies. But though the odds seem stacked against improving things here, Sng has, and maybe, embodies the solution. After listening to my gripe about the situation, he says, “What’s the solution? Passion.”

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This concludes the two-part interview that  The Paginator had with Edric. Read his thoughts on the importance of text to the good design of a newspaper here.

Redesigning newspapers and why it matters

One point, or approximately 0.04 cm, was all it took for readers to find the recently redesigned Sunday Times a comfortable read again. After its redesign in April 2008,several readers complained that it was hard to read the paper’s body copy so designer Peter Thomas Williams increased its leading (amount of space between lines of text) from 11 point to 12 point and to his delight, the week after, a reader sent in an e-mail saying it was much easier to read it.

This is why Peter, who has redesigned ST (twice), The Sunday Times and designed tabla! and my paper, starts every project by working on the typography of its body copy. My Paper proved a challenge for the Irish because he had to design a newspaper that incorporated both the English and Chinese language. He did this by using similar colours and grid system, and picking matching typefaces that unified the disparate languages on to one paper.

While he says that “proper” redesigns usually take up to a year, the recent ST redesign was done in six months, partly to coincide with the launch of ST’s new video news platform Razor TV.  A redesign should not be rushed because it is not just a matter of deciding on a new look but it takes time to introduce it to the sub-editors and into the computer systems, “You can’t just redesign a newspaper and walk away, the hard part is implementing it down the line.” he said.

But didn’t ST redesign in 2004? Peter said that newspapers today redesign every 2 to 3 years in an effort to stay relevant to its readers. In fact, in the most recent redesign, they considered reducing the nameplate to just “ST” because it was known to most of its readers as that.

On a daily basis, one of the biggest challenge in designing a page is working around advertisements says Peter, “The less ads the more beautiful your pages are going to be… SPH (papers) are full of ads.”. He pointed out that the winning designs awarded annually by the Society of News Design rarely have any advertisements on them, but the design editor of my paper is realistic, “That’s where we get our bonuses and your paycheck, so we can’t really complain that much.”

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In the previous part of this interview, The Paginator asks Peter the importance of typography in news design and how the papers of Singapore Press Holdings chooses its typefaces

What type of newspaper are you?

A day before ST’s latest redesign launch, the typeface for its masthead was changed from Popular (only shred of it left is in ‘THE’) to Big Caslon, said Peter Thomas Williams who was part of the redesign team. While Popular failed to live up to its name, because it was thought to be “western” and “old-looking”, Peter, who is also design editor of my paper, said that the biggest factor when he chooses typefaces in his eight years of working in Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), is actually cost.

While he declined to go into specifics, one can do the math based on price lists online. Purchasing one typeface like Big Caslon for use on up to 1000 computers would already cost more than S$5,000. Considering the ST redesign itself involved about four typefaces, multiply that to the cost of installation for more than a thousand computers in SPH and one begins to see how cost becomes a major factor in his typeface choices.

It was on such an “extreme budget” that led Peter, who used to work in a design consultancy in Ireland and as a visual communications lecturer in South Africa, to draw the nameplate of SPH’s Indian diaspora newspaper, Tabla, instead of purchasing a typeface. This was based on three different typefaces: Popular and Calvert for Tabla and the exclamation mark from Bauer Bodoni, which he felt looked like the Indian architectural style.

Costs aside, another important factor is the amount of space a typeface takes up, especially for use as body copy. If it is designed for newspaper use, a typeface is usually efficient in its space management, having a shorter x- and y- height (think shorter x and y and applied to all 26 letters) and kerning (space between letters) is even. A typeface that takes up too much space would mean story lengths have to be shortened to keep the same amount of news on a page. “If you choose a typeface that is beautiful but it is knocking off four paragraphs, it is useless.” he said.

A final factor in choosing a newspaper typeface is how intricate it is as newspapers are printed on paper quality that is “like toilet paper”.  Thus, a font with intricate serfis would not come out looking good as the ink is likely to seep causing such details to be lost.

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In the next part of this interview, The Paginator asks Peter how it was like redesigning ST twice, The Sunday Times and My Paper.