As Stephen Brook reported yesterday, the Daily Mirror has had a makeover. It has not made a song and dance about its revamp and it's conceivable that the majority of readers have hardly noticed much difference. I understand that the paper has received only a handful of emails, all from older readers, saying they were unhappy.
Among journalists though, the changes are obvious and considerable, with new headline and copy fonts, the widespread use of rules - both thick and thin - along with lots of white space in the outer gutters. Many readers have evidently appreciated the extra "whiteness". The redesign may not be exactly revolutionary, but it is certainly daring.
There are many design gimmicks that alter the paper's traditional look, not least the use of upper and lower case italics for some facing page headlines, the airy body type and the use of coloured typefaces. (The yellow-on-green sub-heads, accompanied by white-on-green, and green on white, on the Zimbabwe spread today were an eye-catching example).
I saw a dummy a while ago that was what one might call an "extreme" version of the new look and I'm relieved to see that the editor, Richard Wallace, decided to tone it down. The original design made it difficult for readers to know quite where to start. That is no longer the case.
My feeling about that early dummy was that it made the paper appear too much like a magazine, and I have to say I still feel that's a weakness. The new layout does not assault the eyes, but I think there's far too little copy. I may be wrong, but I'd guess that there are fewer words than in the paper's previous guise.
By far the least convincing pages remain those that form the 3am gossip spread. On the other hand, they are aimed at an age group that tends to read magazines, so I guess older readers are meant to turn them over anyway. But they do not "fit" with the rest of the paper, seeming to have been sent down the line from Heat.
By far the best use of the new design at present is on the sports pages. They fairly zip along, with all the main headlines in italics (which, if I were dare to employ a pun, tend to give the pages a new slant. Sorry). Again, more seriously, I just wonder whether readers are being short-changed on the amount of copy.
One oddity is the continuing presence of so many monochrome pages (22 out of 72) in a paper that is supposed to be publishing in "full colour". (Compare that to only six non-colour pages in today's 72-page issue of The Sun). Some of the Mirror's black-and-white pages occur because advertisers refuse to pay to use the colour facility. But there are others without advertising. It does make the paper look rather unbalanced.
In conclusion, I concede that I have jumped in to offer criticism after only the second day. All designs take time to bed in. However good the design, journalists have a habit of adapting them over time, generally toning down elements they find too radical. Expect tweaks, such as extra xheads, over the next couple of days and weeks.
Wallace appears to be doing two things at once by making these changes. First, he is trying to inject some necessary freshness into his paper. Second, he clearly hopes to put some distance - in terms of aesthetics - between the Mirror and The Sun.
The danger, of course, is in increasing the distance still further in terms of sales. The gap at present is more than 1.5m.
