When I first saw it, I thought they went tabloid. But I like how the displayed part of the front is tabloid-esque, but the inside is still broadsheet.
I had a hard time figuring out how to read the front section, though. When I opened it up like you would any other front section of a newspaper, everything was upside down and it was the back of the section. I guess to read the front properly, you have to turn over and around, and then open it like normal.
It almost needed instructions.
Cecil seemed a little further back than usual too. But maybe that was just me.
SL is still in its rightful place and Missed Connections are illegible, much like the rest of the paper.
That front section opening thing also sucks ass. “Hmm, they printed the damn thing upside-down for some reason…”
I was going to start my own pit thread on this. “When interns go wild” or something. Apparently the redeisgn was done to compete with TIME OUT which will be available presently, so to compete, the Reader had to make the paper as difficult to use and as ugly as possible. Me, I liked the old version, made it feel like it was a real newspaper, significantly more substantial than any of the alternatives. Now, with color, they have that bottom-of-the-barrell white paper that sucks absolute ass.
Change it back before it’s too late (or at least make it a decent change)!
I found that I read much less of it than I usually do. There’s a wealth of new fluff pieces, which look like they’re supposed to become recurring articles, only one of which I read a small part of because it looked amazingly lame (and it was). The color seems pointless – sure advertisers will pay more, but it doesn’t make the paper more substantial, or of a higher quality. And a friend and I were just discussing how the new extra specialization in the personals section makes it much more tedious and annoying to read through. It was more fun to find the creepiest ads all lumped together. Oh, and yes, I too opened it up and was entirely confused about having to turn it upside down and backwards and whatever.
I recall that “big” redesign of New City that happened years ago, attempting to make it more “hip” and instead it just made it illegible and though I rarely read it anymore by then, I just completely gave up on it at that point.
It’s funny, I didn’t know Time Out was coming here, because I though this redesign was an attempt to compete with Red Eye and Red Streak or whatever those fluff rags are called.