Independent editor Chris Blackhurst today unveiled the title’s fourth redesign in the space of three years.
Blackhurst has ditched the Viewspaper second section altogether and considerably beefed-up the paper’s red ‘Independent’masthead.
Features and comment are now spread throughout the single-section paper which has in general been given a livelier more colourful feel.
Blackhurst succeeded Simon Kelner as editor three months ago and had already dropped the previously extensive use of poster-style front pages and made more use of colour.
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Unveiling the new look, which has been timed to coincide with The Indy’s 25th birthday, Blackhurst said that the new masthead is ‘more striking and harder to miss on the newsstands’and added that the ‘body typeface and headline fonts we use have been made made more readable”.
On the Viewspaper second section, he wrote in today’s paper: ‘I’ve become aware that The Viewspaper could be something of a ghetto, to be taken out and read later – but in truth, put on one side and, during a busy day, forgotten.
‘What I want is a faster, more accessible and urgent paper, one that is easily navigated and that puts you in no doubt what The Independent stands for and what its brilliant, provocative columnists and writers are thinking.”
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Blackhurst said that he hopes the result of the redesign is ‘a modern, confident, dynamic, sharper paper – one that remains exactly true to its original values but is now a friendlier, less daunting read”.
In September 2008, then editor Roger Alton gave The Independent its first full-colour redesign – with a new second section called Life.
That second section was replaced with the Viewspaper in April 2010, when Simon Kelner presided over a more sober redesign of the paper which launched a week after Alton’s departure. This followed the paper’s acquisition by Alexander Lebedev in March of that year.
Kelner revealed another new look for The Independent in October 2010, when it went more up-market again with a new look to coincide with the launch of cut-price stablemate i, in which black and white predominated on the news pages.
The latest new look for The Independent appears to be a return to the more colourful and accessible approach adopted by Alton three years ago.
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