Irish Ayes: A close look at the
redesign of the Ulster Herald

By Tony Sutton

Heard the one about the Irishman who went into the newsagent’s to buy a copy of his local weekly paper? He couldn’t find one anywhere, so he barked at the assistant, “Where’s my Herald?” She pointed wearily to the pile directly in front of him. “Oh, I didn’t recognize it; it looks so different,” he murmered as he handed over his cash.

Yes, the changes to the Ulster Herald were very, very dramatic. Until April this year, the Omagh-based weekly had been a dour, 10-column black-and-white paper topped by a tired blackletter nameplate that had been there for much of its 99-year existence.
The paper that readers saw on that spring morning was a chalk-and-cheese metamorphosis into the brightest, most colorful broadsheet in Northern Ireland. The changeover was fast, but the process took nearly two years, memorable for short bursts of manic energy, long periods of inactivity, massive indecision and much sinking of copious pints of Guinness late at night in the Top of the Town bar, conveniently situated across the street from the paper’s office.

The impetus to remake the paper began almost three years ago when Dominic McClements became editor of the Herald, flagship paper of the family-owned North West of Ireland Publishing Co (other papers are the Fermanagh Herald based at Enniskillen, Strabane Chronicle at Strabane and the Donegal News at Letterkenny, over the border in the Irish Republic).

His recommendation to redesign, cautiously supported by the company’s board of directors, was made just as the UK’s provincial newspapers were becoming more design conscious, spurred by the example of the nation’s fiercely-aggressive national press which has become bolder, more competitive and more colorful over the past half decade.

There’s nothing strange about this sudden interest in design: Ireland’s paid-for weeklies are increasingly being forced to fight for their readers’ attention against a mass of national and local daily competitors on the shelves and floors of every newsagent.

The Ulster Herald sells nearly 12,000 copies a week but, unlike most UK provincial weeklies, it has a local competitor – the 9,000 circulation Tyrone Constitution. Why two papers? Omagh, in common with most other towns in Northern Ireland, is served by separate papers, each historically reflecting the political and religious views of their Catholic or Protestant communities. The Herald’s affiliation? Catholic, although it and the Constitution are trying to move away from partisan politics.

How it began
The redesign process began with focus groups, at which readers told the publishers that they liked the Herald for its district news and sports, but not for its hard news, which was described as bland. In addition, they said its stories were too long, it lacked humor and didn’t cater enough for women and children.

That wasn’t all. Readers were also unhappy with the “messy and cramped” look of the paper. One reader said that, apart from the lack of interesting content, the inside pages of the paper were just solid advertising. Another attacked the overall lack of organization, saying “You can miss things because stories and pictures just seem to go all over the place.” Others drew attention to poor photography and lack of color printing.

But they complained most stridently about the size of the Herald’s broadsheet pages – among the widest in Britain at 23” deep by 17.5” wide (nearly 50 per cent wider the new North American standard format) – with 76 per cent of readers saying they’d prefer a tabloid for ease of reading and handling.

Armed with the research and bolstered by long notes from Dominic, I began work in my studio in the spring of 1999, taking a front page of the newspaper and producing two new versions, one a narrower 8-column broadsheet, the second a scaled-down, but restrained, tabloid, both with heads in Walbaum Condensed.

The broadsheet was rejected immediately – the paper was going to be tabloid! But the nameplate on the tabloid version was too restrained – could I be bolder? The second effort – a two-tone header in Franklin Gothic Compressed – was intriguing and controversial, some staffers thinking it signaled too much of a shift from the conservatism of the previous staid blackletter style (it’s amazing how journalists suddenly become attached to the old nameplate – usually on behalf of readers – just as it’s about to be replaced by a new one). Interestingly, when this prototype was shown to board members and a sample of readers, the rejection rate was much lower; but this editorial uncertainty plagued us right up to publication of the first redesigned issue.
But, first things first, we had other issues more urgent than a change of nameplate.

– We were committed to color printing, but a decision had to be made whether to contract out the printing or upgrade the Goss press with extra units to give it process color capacity.

– The redesign brief took for granted that we’d be doing full-page make-up using QuarkXpress. At the time the paper was still assembled by cut-and-paste by a unionized production department that was uncertain of its future.

– There were no plans to develop an editorial production department to handle the pages; they’d be put together by each paper’s reporters and editor.

– Perhaps the most crucial issue of all was that we’d be relaunching all four papers at the same time. Could we really do this and accommodate all the other changes?

This was the uncertain scenario when I paid my first visit to Omagh in July 1999, just a couple of weeks before the anniversary of the bomb attack by the Real IRA that had killed 29 people in the town a year earlier.

Laboring in a corner of the soon-to-be-gutted production department, a few feet away from an antique – but still working – Linotype typesetting machine, Dominic and I began the laborious task of assembling a complete news section of the tabloid version of the Herald, together with new front and inside pages for the other three papers – the Strabane Chronicle, Fermanagh Herald and Donegal News – for a press run that would take place before I left town a week later.

The response to this test was mixed: we were happy with the direction of Ulster and Fermanagh, despite the absence of process color in our print tests, but knew we’d have to rethink the Strabane and Donegal fronts, which were neither as bright nor as compelling as we’d intended.

Hurry up and wait
My second trip to Northern Ireland, near the end of the year, followed a similar pattern of long work sessions interrupted in the early evening by a break to top up our creativity with a few pints of Guinness in the Top Of The Town. At the end of the week, new and more complete sets of prototypes were printed, ready for approval. We knew we still had a pile of stuff to finish but were convinced we were about to enter the home stretch – with bright section fronts for each paper, a neat new typographic structure and some interesting content changes planned. All we had to do was wait for the directors to okay the change of format, sort out the printing and set a date for the changeover.

We waited and waited.

Additional press units were installed in a new print facility during the middle of 2000. Then, just before Christmas, a year after printing our second prototypes, I received a frantic e-mail from Dominic telling me the good news: the management had finally made its decision – we had to get the job completed by the end of April.

The bad news followed: the two broadsheet papers would be changing size – but not to tabloid. They’d be an inch narrower – 16.5 inches – but still on a 10-column format, while the tabs would also change size and switch from six columns to a 7-column grid. He suggested I get back to Ireland as early as possible in the new year as he had been told to abandon everything else and concentrate on the redesigns.

Fitting the newly-urgent Irish redesigns into my schedule was the next problem, as I was working flat out developing final prototypes for the February launch of the Portland Tribune, a new paper in Portland, Oregon, making changes to the weekend edition of the Evening Times in Glasgow, Scotland, and completing the redesign of a Canadian weekly in Surrey, B.C.

Timetables adjusted, I flew back to Omagh at the end of January where Dominic and I devoted most of a week to creating formats for the Donegal and Strabane newspapers, spending the remaining time re-engineering the tabloid prototypes of the Ulster Herald back into a broadsheet format. Our biggest challenge was getting QuarkXpress to hyphenate our new text typeface without leaving rivers of white space in the narrow eight-pica columns. With the tight relaunch deadline, we’d abandoned our plan to use a different textface for each paper and had opted instead for a common face – Nick Shinn’s Worldwide, designed especially for narrow newspaper columns. But, even with the text at 8.2pt (the Irish must have better eyesight than Americans – perhaps it’s the Guinness!), we had trouble getting the hyphenation to work without lots of manual tinkering. That led to a decision to use wider-than-normal setting wherever possible and set text ragged when running it in eight-pica columns.

What’s in a name(plate)?
The biggest worry was the continuing indecision over the Ulster Herald’s nameplate. We began the change back to broadsheet by simply enlarging the Franklin Gothic typestyle we’d used in the tabloid prototype, but that was way too big and bold, so we tried a few variations, shifting from a not-quite-so-bold red/black sans to a more restrained gray/black serif. We showed page proofs of the new styles to everyone who came into the office and discovered, contrary to expectation, that the older folk were much more amenable to the bolder nameplate than the youngsters.

When I left Ireland at the end of another frazzled week, we were happy with our progress: we’d finally resolved the look of the Strabane and Donegal papers, Fermanagh was ready to go and, apart from the nameplate, we’d nailed down the style for each section of the Ulster Herald. Everything else could be decided by e-mail after I’d returned to Canada. But the Herald nameplate continued to haunt us and rapidly became an obsession for Dominic who, as editor, knew he’d have to face any repercussions long after I’d fled back home to Canada to count my bag of loot.

The depth of his uncertainty is apparent from the tone of one of his e-mails a month before the relaunch: “This is one issue I’m finding hard to get unanimous agreement on. I think we have two camps: one is the more adventurous group which likes to take the leap towards the audacious; the others are more conservative, their idea of a nameplate is influenced by what they already have and by what they see on the news-stands. They think what we’re doing is too bold, too colorful and not subtle enough. So how do I get it right?”

“My head is in a spin as I’m trying to take all views on board – I’m not even sure what I want myself now: sans or serif – that’s the big dilemma; red or blue (although let’s be careful as we don’t want a splash of those old British colors – or Irish for that matter – politics is a very sensitive issue here).”

Murphy’s law takes hold
Ten days later, just three weeks before the launch, he e-mailed me with a new, non design-related anxiety: “We’ve hit another big problem – this time not of our making – the country has virtually closed because of the foot and mouth epidemic in England. Nothing is moving – all sport is off, St. Patrick’s Day has been cancelled, some priests have even cancelled mass. Our concern is: What will we put in the paper when we launch? The broadsheet will be most affected as our big marketing plug is the new sports and entertainment tabloids. But we’ll be lucky to get three pages of sports if this continues.”

Fortunately, the foot and mouth shutdown was short-lived and the panic subsided. But there was one more surprise: faced with increasing competition, the editor of the Donegal paper (upon which we’d devoted so much of our valuable pre-launch time), decided he’d rather wait a few months before relaunching his paper. We cursed this decision at the time, but it was to turn out to be very wise, as Dominic and I discovered when I returned to Ireland to oversee the relaunch of the papers during the last week of March and first week of April.

Even without the fourth paper, our task was daunting:

– We were attempting major change with very limited resources;

– The web change had taken place the week before, but we were about to produce every page – editorial and advertising – electronically for the first time;

– We were developing new sections and all papers would be printed in full process color, again a first;

– And we had no new staff to help produce the pages. The reporters were expected to design all the pages, although most were already overworked and nervous novices with QuarkXpress.

Batter up
The first paper to undergo the redesign surgery was the Fermanagh Herald, a three-section tabloid, the pages of which were produced in Enniskillen, 26 miles away, and delivered electronically to the Omagh production department where Dominic and I would be on hand to make sure they adhered to the new style and remake those that didn’t.

Editorially, we had few problems, although a number of pages disappeared while being transmitted and were recovered only by some deft computer tinkering by general manager Kevin Mitchell; while the advertising pages were a headache for production staff Colm Martin and Andy Hyndman, who had to pair the pages digitally for the press.
A steady procession of Postscript errors caused huge delays in getting the pages through the processor, delaying print until four in the morning. But, apart from some problems with badly-spaced classifieds (getting Baseview technical assistance is a nightmare in Ireland), and a sports agate page that was printed twice on the same spread, we and Fermanagh editor Pauline Leary were proud of the result. More important, the readers – who had NOT been informed of the changes – were delighted with their colorful new paper (and were very forgiving of our errors).
Next up: Strabane

The second paper to undergo transformation, the next day, was the Strabane Chronicle, another tabloid which was, at 32 pages, the smallest paper in the group. Again the classifieds caused problems, a few of the page headers disappeared and there were a handful of Postscript errors, but the paper was again declared a rousing success.

Two down, the big one to go
Dominic and I spent the weekend preparing for the onslaught to come when we had to slot the three sections (20 broadsheet and two 16-page tabloids) of the Ulster Herald between the tight production cycles of the tabloids.
We were, needless to say, still uncertain about the Herald’s nameplate, especially as Dominic, after seeing a copy of the newly-launched Portland Tribune that I’d brought with me, thought we ought to print a background wash behind the type and teasers. So we were still printing prototype front pages just a few hours before going to press with the first revised issue. (You may be wondering how we ever made up our minds about the nameplate. Truth is, we didn’t. The decision was made by Joe the Printer when he told us the press couldn’t hold a consistent background tint right across the page.)

Nameplate finally agreed, production hassles delayed printing for a couple of hours before Dominic, Kevin Mitchell and I waited fearfully in front of the Goss at three in the morning for the birth of our new baby. But we loved it, despite its slight imperfections. Now, what would the readers think?

We found the answer to that question when we staggered wearily back into the office a few hours later when, amazingly – to us, anyway – the reaction was almost unanimously in favor of the new look, although a number of callers found the tabloids confusing. We’d inserted the entertainment tab – The Scene, which was stuffed with ads – into the center of the ad-free sports section without telling readers where to find it. And, as we discovered that morning, quite a few of them don’t read the sports section; they just heave it straight into the nearest rubbish bin.

Ah, well, that’s what happens when you spend too much time worrying about the nameplate. The muddle was fixed the following week, when the front page index was used to signpost the contents of the tabloid sections, and reinforced six weeks later when someone had the bright idea to stuff the sports tab into The Scene.

What did the readers think of the new look? Some of their comments, published in street interviews a week later: “It really does make the paper easier to read … gives the whole paper a wee lift … the paper really looks better than other local papers … a vast improvement, makes you want to pick up the paper right away … the new Herald will be more appealing to young people.” Just what we wanted to hear.
Heard the one about the English designer who went into the newsagent’s to buy something to read on the morning he was leaving Ireland. He glanced at the piles of papers on the floor, instantly aware that the one he noticed first – it was brighter, bolder and more colorful than the rest – wasn’t one of the London national papers. It was the local weekly. Uh, oh, he wondered, did we go too far with that nameplate? Then he heard someone say, “Have you seen the new Ulster Herald? Doesn’t it look fabulous …”

Postscript
Six weeks after the redesign launch, Ulster Herald editor Dominic McClements and his small team of journalists continued to lap up the positive feedback from readers. Of course, he said, there was the odd call from readers who “still preferred the old Herald.” When asked to explain why, most struggled for an answer. “Don’t know, really. I just don’t like change,” one replied.

Added Dominic, “Those few days before, during and after the redesign launch were probably the most worrying days I have ever experienced in this job. I simply wasn’t sure what the reaction would be and was afraid the whole project would backfire.”
“Tony Sutton tried to assure us. After all, he had been through the same process with other papers around the world, but it was still nerve-wracking. But once the phones started to ring on Thursday morning from callers bubbling with enthusiasm about the paper, I knew that all was well. Ever since, my staff and I have been stopped on the street and told what a fine job we had done. It’s great to receive such feedback.”
“It was even sweeter to hear our rivals heap praise on us. It seems we really broke the mould as far as weekly newspapers were concerned and now the rest are beginning to sit up and take notice.”

“The long hours, sweating in front of a Mac continued long after the redesign launch date but no one seemed to mind working way past the hour they should have been at home with their families. After all, they had their own new baby to nourish. This was their new pride and joy and they wanted to make sure it looked good.”

“Now we can’t wait to tackle the Donegal News later this year.”

This article originally appeared in Design magazine