Satsueisha

The Straits Times Front Page for August 8, 2008

The Straits Times unveiled its redesign three days ago on August 8. After looking at two days of the new look paper (Sunday Times retained its look), what’s my verdict?

Nothing much changed.

It’s still the same old The Straits Times with a change of clothes. Inside though, everything remains. It still toes the party line (which party you know quite well), and the Review & Forum pages have the same old boring stuff.

The day after, a whole page was dedicated to self-praise, with readers writing in to praise the editor, the colorful pages, and how “interesting” everything looks.

Nothing much really changed. You still have the self-congratulatory writers, and the old mindset: Print Is King.

Straitstimes.com

It still looks terrible, mostly because there’s no proper guide, the CSS is buggy, and their videos are sub-standard. Reporters aren’t filing for the web – they are still filing for print. Everyone who has been on the web for long enough knows print headlines can’t work well on the web, yet ST still uses the same headlines on both platforms.

On the top there’s an option for Straits Times Digital, basically for people who want to see the newspaper in “print form” online, but why repeat the nameplate twice? The scrolling headlines aren’t clickable, and there are two search forms – one for rednano.sg at the top right, and the real search bar at the bottom left is tiny.

Not much thought had been put into the redesign, because websites are supposed to be the new face of newspapers, yet little has been invested on straitstimes.com. Yawning Bread also said the “homepages are a mess”. Well, that’s what you get when you put people who designed Stomp onto your web redesign team.

The editor of straitstimes.com Joanne Lee apologised and said:

WE apologise for the difficulties that you may be encountering on this site. In redesigning and making changes to it, the operations of the site have been affected – as well as the way it looks, including on this home page.

Our technical team has been working to resolve the problems on this since Aug 8. We hope you’ll bear with us as we continue our repair efforts.

But now let’s talk about the newspaper itself:

Nameplate

Editor Han Fook Kwang says the nameplate reflects ST’s tradition, but Big Caslon reall doesn’t work here. The Egyptian typeface worked well on the old nameplate, but use the same concept on Big Caslon, and your nameplate falls flat.

The full-stop at the end of the nameplate? Utter rubbish. It was there to enhance the Egyptian serifs, but with Big Caslon’s curves, it looks out of place, and making it orange makes it even worse.

P.S. Mr Han, it’s a nameplate, not a masthead! The masthead’s the area with your name beside it.

Skybox

The area right below the nameplate’s called the skybox, but anyway it looks great now. Great idea to have all your URLs right below it – prominent and it works.

Headlines

Short and snappy. News and commentary set in Rocky, Sports is set in Benton. Rocky’s fine, but Benton looks weird.

Body text

Now in Quiosco, the editors can squeeze more words in without compromising on readability. Nothing much different here.

Page headers

Okay these look better because of the higher contrast.

One thing’s for sure though: Too many parts. There’s all the way till Part E, which is sickening. The paper’s too thick and chock full of ads. I want content! And since the headlines got snappier, can’t the text too?

I still like the Danilo Black design better.

Others have been talking about this too

• Yawning Bread: Straits Times redesign, Part 1, Part 2
• Mr Brown: Straits Times gets new look and online needs registration
• Acxis wants the old designs back
• Shi Hengcheong: Confused by website
• Simply Jean: Makeovers – the new dirty word
• Asia Media Journal: SPH To Redesign Straits Times
• Press Run: The revealing new-look Straits Times
• Techie Lobang: The Straits Times New Look, New Features, Freebies