Are there new concepts and fonts?

Jason asked in a comment left on the May 16 entry:

What are some of the new concepts being thrown around?
Does such a switch bring about any particular concerns when choosing a font pallet?

The tabloid shape is probably the biggest new concept to work with.

The new page size (see the purple shaded area in the diagram to the left) is roughly 40% smaller, so art and headlines won’t have to be as large to dominate the page.
The new shape does retain the national standard advertising measures in column width so as to conform to industry standards and keep us from having to morph or adapt ads to odd widths.


We will look at packaging across the gutter.
Ad stacks to the outside of two facing pages make a much more manageable editorial “well” that can be bridged by page toppers and similar content can played as one package.

The true doubletruck in the center of the paper will create a magazine-like display area, a wonderful opportunity for features, photo packages and special reports.
It will also offer a dynamite location for a what was a full-page broadsheet advertisement.

Editors Libby Davis and Kayla Mezzell worked on prototype content with Design Director Julie Susman. Some of the new content ideas include bringing back the Purple Poll (a person-on-the-street commentary package), a student profile and little-known facts and figures about TCU and its community members.
There are also plans to aggressively pursue content generated by TCU students outside of the Skiff and the Schieffer School of Journalism.

Julie and Kayla are working on nameplate options.


They posted several for the redesign team to review during our weekly meeting.
Some are very traditional, others shall we say are quite… different!
We hope to post images of the new front pages for folks to comment on by midweek.

With time restraints and few, if any, complaints about legibility or readability from our readers, we have elected to stay with the fonts used in the broadsheet. We will be looking at adjusting the headline schedule and weights of the fonts used throughout the product.

Selecting new fonts is a huge undertaking and involves hours of reviewing and testing.
We could have easily taken up two weeks on fonts alone!

To look at a nice variety of fonts for newspapers to choose from, check out the folks at the Font Bureau.