Mark Porter

A few people have asked me what I though of the Le Monde redesign which hit the kiosks last week. I’ve only seen one copy (today’s) so far but the short answer is, I like it!

As editor Eric Fottorino explains, this version builds on the foundations of the Palmer Watson redesign of 2005, which did a fantastic job of modernising a paper which had tended to shun design. 2005 brought big type, strong photography and a clearer hierarchy of information. All these trends continue.

The philosophy is to emphasise the strengths of what they’re calling “le Monde papier”, i.e. long text and big pictures, all very much in line with my views.

But although a lot remains from the last redesign, there are also a few corrections which seem to look back to the past, and which I, for one, welcome.

The headline type has changed. Out goes Matthew Carter’s Rocky, and in comes Lucas de Groot’s TheAntiqua. I think it works well. Even though Lucas is Dutch, TheAntiqua feels more French than Rocky, (which is good) and reminds me a little of the previous Le Monde fonts from Jean-Francois Porchez.

The front page has more stories and a teaser panel under the titlepiece. My copy also has no photo, just the Plantu cartoon. All very much a reversion to the past.

Page 3 is dedicated to a single theme with a decent length of text (though perhaps not by Le Monde standards), and a big picture.

The news pages have smaller headlines, with stories separated by bold black cut-off rules, and are mainly back on the 6-column grid. Some of the more complex furniture and page elements are simplified (although there’s a scattering of blobby web-2.0-style round cornered boxes and arrows), and the overall effect feels cooler, more serious and denser. There’s a hint of Guardian here in the positioning of the headlines, which hang from the rules with two lines of space underneath. I like this system as it brings a bit of air into even very dense pages.

Theres a big bang when you get to the long pieces (the analysis and reportage). These pages retain the very large headlines of the previous design, and try hard with images and graphics, with varying dgeress of success. Its very hard to do these spreads successfully in a newspaper which doesn’t have an established design culture (and department), but the simplicity of the pages helps here.

I gather theres’ a G2-style second section too, but I didn’t seem to get one in my UK copy.

Its a shame there’s not more colour (that could just be the overseas copies but I think it’s the same in France), and to my eye theres slightly too much contrast between the dense news pages and the display on the news features. I also prefer a flatplan which mixes up the big landmark pages with the quiter ones.

But overall I think this is a successful revision. And most pleasing of all is the fact that it feels just a little bit more French, and a little bit more like Le Monde than it did before.

There’s a slidehsow of some pages here. And I haven’t heard who did the project. Can anyone tell me?