Tag: The Straits Times

Graphics are for the less educated?

The New Paper (TNP), a tabloid paper, uses a lot more graphics in its stories than most of the other local papers. One reason I can think of is that graphics are seen as tools to present data in a simple manner and TNP’s target audience has traditionally been the blue-collared workers who are less comfortable with text either in quantity or quality. Besides, its focus on foreign soccer league news, means it has to offer more value than what it publishes from foreign news sources, thus presenting exciting moments of the games in graphic form has figured prominently in the paper.

But are graphics only meant for the simplification of data?

Not so, says Alberto Cairo, an infographic designer and author of Infografía 2.0. He argues that just as there are complex texts, some graphics need to be complex too. The book is in Spanish but according to a review by Infographic News, the key is in providing “layers” that allow a reader to get information at a glance but also delve deeper for the details.

This is an un-attributed infographic found in yesterday’s Straits Times about the Singapore Navy’s launch of its largest combat vessels the new stealth frigates, at 114.8m long.

stshipjan172009

Compare this with another infographic done by Juan Cholbi of a Spanish newspaper on the launch of an aircraft carrierportaaviones

To be fair, the ships are different in size and ST probably had space constraints. A graphic like the latter would have easily taken up half a page instead of the quarter page that ST gave. Still, if you get a chance to read the ST report, a lot of it focuses on rhetoric about how new frigates will improve maritime security (duh!). From a reader’s perspective, I think it would be more interesting to learn that this is the Navy’s largest combat frigate!

Juan Cholbi’s piece works as an example of having the main details like a sense of scale for the reader, at the left hand side, where the aircraft carrier’s size is compared to others and also the other details that might simply be more interesting for the military geek.

Negotiating ads through design

The New York Times (NYT) latest decision to sell display advertisements on its front-page raised a few eyebrows in the journalism world as it was seen by some as a commercial intrusion into the most sacred space of newspapers.

However, in Singapore, this has hardly been the case. In 2006, The Straits Times (ST) started selling the section cover pages (except its cover page) and it has always sold the kind of ads that the NYT so recently embraced.

And if one looks even further back in Singapore newspapers, cover pages filled with ads were the norm. Here are the cover pages of the former The Singapore Free Press and The Straits Times from 1932. singapore-free-press-19322st11932

Ads play a big part in determining newspaper design, especially in ST. In my time there, the news pages always came to the designers with the ads already fixed on the page. The job of the designer was to place the news in reaction to the constraints.

Since advertisements are sold at fixed sizes and rates, the space for design is usually just a inverted L-shape that limits the possibilities of experimentation as compared to a full blank page. In fact, how often do you see a news page on ST without ads?

Not only do ads constrain the amount of space for news design, the scope for design is limited too as it has to keep itself plain and simple in relation to ads that are usually fanciful.

And this is why I think pages on ST turn out looking very predictable as compared to newspaper designs that I love like Financial Times that have much less ads to contend with.

New-look ST: Really A Better Read?

If there is one thing that I already knew after reading the redesigned Straits Times was that the next day, the would run a self-congratulatory article about how its readers liked it. One thing that surprised me, was how they ran promotional articles about the new look on its cover page a few days before the launch. In what way would those articles constitute news that the reader must know first thing in the morning? If that’s not enough, a blogger pointed out that the new ST Homepage launched with a video of bikini babes…

I think such self-promotion, or selling of the ST brand, is telling of how it had become much more concerned about its commercial viability as a corporation and not just being a newspaper. I would suggest that this concern manifests in its re-design.

Indecisive masthead
The masthead embodies a newspaper’s “identity”, and ST’s feeble attempt to mix the old and the new, only suggests how a lot of this newspaper is a compromise. The root of ST’s problem is its compromised answer to who does it want to attract? Time and again, the answer seems to be, we want to be the newspaper for all English readers. After all, the Singapore market is so small and the newspaper market is in decline, hence it must be kiasu: to survive, target everyone! Its attempt to be everything to everyone shows in its re-design — colourful, mix-and-match, yet really indistinguishable. As for the token nod to its heritage with the “.”, I’ll say that some things die with time for a reason, and bringing something back from the dead doesn’t make it a “comeback”. 

Blurring the distinction between news and advertisements
While some would argue that the paper looks more vibrant with its multitude of colours, it is this very explosion of palate — in terms of colours, fonts, and styles — that give the presentation of news a “glossy” sheen that I would associate with advertisements. While I like the use of a bigger headline size, the choice of the font, Rocky, is distracting because it has distinct serifs that call attention to the individual letters than to read as a word. In fact, I would think the font is fanciful and associate with use in advertisements, and as a reader I feel I cannot quickly and clearly distinguish where is the news and what it is about. This failure (deliberate or not) to clearly demarcate news and advertisement gets especially troublesome in the advertorials. In the Aug 8 issue in the Life! section, there was a “Special: Corporate Milestones” report, one can see that the distinction in design elements are very subtle. 

More white space, not just line space
The news stories now have more line space that make reading breezier, but does that mean stories suffer from the lack of space? How does the bigger headline size restrict the number of stories as well as their depth? I think these are some interesting posers that will be answered in time. For me, it’s more important that a design gives me enough white space to ponder between stories and breathe amidst the claustrophobia induced by the kaleidoscope of colours and advertisements in this new design.

So three of the English newspapers had a re-design this year, Sunday Times, TODAY and now The Straits Times. In my opinion, TODAY, did the best because it came out cleaner, more modern, and more distinguishable. The last I heard, a little bird said The New Paper was going to be re-designed too. That would be interesting, how would a tabloid targeting the professional English-speaking class look like?

P.S. I’ll bet in the next few days we’ll see stories about new-highs in viewership for all the other online forms of ST…