IT is time to embrace the inner geek, dust off the old encyclopaedia of fonts and go hog wild with an Apple Mac. This great post about the San Antonio Express-News illustrates one of THE great pleasures of the newspaper journalist - designing the front page. Even better if we can twitter pic it through the process. That's big and small media right there.
Now GM has been involved in many a redesign and none, not one, ever added circulation. It always struck us a craven exercise in journalistic masturbation.
All those discussions about what message a font sends out and all that talking of tweaking horizontal scale and squeezing leading leads to hilarious heated debates in editorial leadership meetings driven by powerpoints complete with slides racing off the side of the screen accompanied by the sound of a racing car.
You can almost hear Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie spilling whisky and shouting: "Godammit to hell, John, do you think the people of Walton want a 1pt key line around their three column pictures? Blast it, I'd bet all the Scotch in Aughtermuchty and the BNFL regional award I paid £40 for, that they do."
Having said that, there are few things better journalistically than designing a newspaper page, and nothing better than doing the splash.
Have look here at an experiment from San Antonio.
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