Now that the redesign of the Times and the Daily Mirror has had time to settle in, what do you make of the papers' new looks? And why are they both obsessed with italics?
Most people don't like change, especially people who listen to BBC Radio 4. So I hesitate to put the boot in too hastily. With apologies to Woody Allen, newspapers are like sharks - if they don't move forward, they die.
But I really did prefer the Times and the Mirror before their latest makeover. The problem, I would suggest, is common to both their new looks - too fussy, over-complicated, a preponderance of white space and a feeling there isn't as much copy in them as there used to be.
In short, I knew where I used to stand with the Times and the Mirror. Now, just occasionally, I don't know where to start, and find myself yearning for good old fashioned newspaper design.
Take Times editor James Harding's decision to shift The Thunderer's editorial to page two. Sure, page two has a tendency to be a bit of a dead page, but it just looks odd having the leading articles separate to the rest of comment and tends to devalue the opinion pieces which crop up a third of the way through the paper.
I used to enjoy the look of Times2, if not always the content, but the new look just doesn't do it for me. It feels like a throwback to the Independent's first effort at a tabloid pullout section, and that didn't work either.
Now Times2 has so many italics I read it at a 20 degrees angle so I don't feel seasick.
The Mirror likes italics too. Scrap that, it adores italics, almost as much as it loves picture by-lines of writers so small you can't really see their face.
Don't get me wrong - I'm no italics basher - but it seems to me if you use them page after page they rather lose their impact. And I wish its magazine-style layout wasn't trying to pretend so hard it wasn't a newspaper.
Even worse are the little arrows that point from the headlines to the picture, just in case you didn't know what it was referring to (exhibit A and B: pages 18 and 20 in today's paper, among others). No need!
And what's that alarm bell thing next to Sue Carroll's head on page 25? Answers on a blog, please...
