By Staff

Every few years it falls on the editorial staff to evaluate the Collegians design. While circulation rates would suggest that print media may be moving toward antiquity, they are not immune to change.

So we asked ourselves: can we improve the way we present our content? Although the Collegians previous look was only two years old, we were persistently bothered by it. The old body font was hard to read. The cluttered layout prohibited rich visuals, like infographics and photo illustrations. And the five sections news, opinions, arts, features and sports were not clearly delineated.

To our eyes, the new look is crisp. Weve updated our entire font library. Caslon, our new body font and Benjamin Franklins typeface of choice, is brawny and legible. Weve shifted to down-style headlines, capitalized like sentences. This is a trend started by the Associated Press and followed by the likes of the Washington Post, which argues sentence-style headlines are less stuffy and easier to read.

Weve also created space at the top of each section for new content, and were using that space to integrate social media and record campus voices on national issues. For example, each of our sections now has an individual Twitter account. We urge our readers to take advantage of this new communicative tool.

Our goal is to broaden the Collegians scope of interest while giving our readers new ways to interface with the paper. The new look is meant to make the newspaper easier to take in at a glance. We want to be more accessible to our readers, and we hope the new design will achieve this goal.

With the new design we have more freedom with our graphics and visual representations. We will be able to create more complex designs that not only echo the content of the articles they accompany but also offer new information. Visual aids need to be clean and concise. They are the quickest way our readers can glean information from a story while thumbing through a section.

In addition to these print changes, the Collegian will be rolling out a new website in the next few weeks.

The intent here is not to be radical or to alienate our readers. The Collegians decidedly modern, new look may seem like a sudden shift, but we will remain devoted to covering what matters to you, our readers.

The Collegian has served the Gambier community since 1856. While our style may have changed, our commitment to solid reporting has not.

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