Exactly the wrong way to do modern print design

WE OCCASIONALLY dip our toes into to the world of newspaper and magazine design, usually the great redesigns of US newspapers.
However my local prospective Lib Dem candidate Richard Clein, a former journalist and now successful PR man is the mastermind behind this A3 'local freesheet style newspaper leaflet which came through the door.
a) How in the modern age of inexpensive DTP and sophisticated campaigning did this pass the quality control? It's appalling. And,
b) the back page looks like it was designed by whoever puts together Sovereign Nation, Saoirse or one of the other dissenting Republican newspapers. In fact it makes their design sensibility seem like Wallpaper* or Vice magazine.

Click on each to have a look at how bad they are, apologies for the poor pics but scanner is out here at GM Towers.

I especially like the weekly newspaper circa 1990 picture of the bloke pointing at a sign in the top left hand corner of Irish Republican-styled back page.

BTW: With those stylings shouldn't there be some War News on that page?

Splash course in the newspaper design process

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.