Mark Porter

Shocking news: Britain’s red-top tabloids have discovered design! The first signs are in the Daily Mirror, which has been working with Barcelona’s Cases Associats (full disclosure: I know the Cases team and have done some talks for them and their clients). They seem to be rolling the redesign out gradually, and so far only the “Your Life” section (and “Mania” at the weekend) have had the full treatment. Sport has a new look with a lot of rough edges. And the news pages are still old-school Mirror with some rationalised typography and a scattering of the kind of gizmos we’ve come to expect from Cases.

Opinions are divided, but to me it looks like the start of something really interesting. “Your Life” is a little OTT, but the kandy kolors, car-crash typography and decorative devices help to create a visual language that marries tabloid energy with a real design sense. It looks pretty fresh in a UK newspaper, although some of the better-designed celeb and gossip magazines have been doing this kind of thing for a while. Sport is not entirely successful, but there’s a glimpse, just out of reach, of something good; like some of those insanely vibrant Brazilian and Spanish football papers, but with an English accent. The news pages are rather ordinary, but I expect more changes to follow.

Something has definitely come over the tabloids as they move to full colour. The Mirror is working with Cases; the Sun is being redesigned (by Alfredo Triviño at NI); the Evening Standard has slowly been reordering itself into something that looks a bit like a modern newspaper; soon only the Mail may still look like it was thrown together by an inky-fingered printer in 1958. In recent decades the tabs have stuck with a chaotic editor-driven style (or lack of it) and viewed designers with suspicion. The idea seems to be that the average punter doesn’t want, or can’t handle, good design — a patronising view that only newspaper editors and housing developers still seem to hold. There are tabloids in other parts of the world which are just as demotic and trashy as ours, but have proper typography. The trick for the designers who are dragging the Sun and the Mirror into the 21st century will be to sweep clean while preserving some of the unique flavour of the British vernacular — the part that is not incompatible with decent editorial design.

So far, the Mirror looks like a good attempt. And I hope they can keep it up. This seems like a complex design that will require discipline to maintain, and design discipline is not something normally associated with tabloid editors. Anyone who has redesigned newspapers from the outisde knows that it doesn’t matter how much you build templates, hold seminars and deliver style books; editors must genuinely buy into culture change (and you need an in-house Art Director with the guts and energy to be an advocate for the design when the consultants fly home).

(Excuse the poor pictures, I’ll try to get some PDFs)