Mark Porter

The London Evening Standard was relaunched yesterday.

It’s an established paper which has struggled to find a voice since the rise of the free papers in London. In its previous incarnation it was a pretty depressing read, adopting the gloomy/angry style of journalism of its big brother the Daily Mail. But the design had slowly been improving from awful to not bad at all.

It has now been bought by a Russian oligarch and the reluanch aims to be more positive — a celebration of everything that’s good about London.

The design is certainly brighter. The main typeface is Publico, which I commissioned for a Portuguese paper from Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes (gratifying to see it popping up in redesigns all around the world, most recently in the new Atlanta Journal Constitution). The colour palette, folios, labelling etc are sharper and more contemporary, aiming for that crisp modern style that the Cases studio does so well. But this stuff is pretty superficial, and it’s not carried through to the detailed typography and layout of the pages, which still retain some of the looseness and clumsiness I associate with the worst of the old Standard.

The designers and editors of a paid-for city paper like this have a problem: how do you make it better and more special than the free papers? The first response editors usually give is “great writing”. Yesterday’s Standard had a piece by Tom Wolfe in it, but they can’t afford that every day (and someone so connected to New York is a curious choice for a paper that’s supposed to be celebrating London). But it’s harder with design because so many of the free city papers all over the world are designed by very professional and experienced teams, and look sharper than their paid-for competitors.

There are some good things in this new Standard design, but ironically they have the effect of making it feel more like a free paper, not less.