Every so often, you need to shake things up.
It’s been about four years since the INDY’s last redesign, which came about four years after the previous one. So I suppose we’re right on schedule. In any event, I think this one’s gorgeous, and I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.
But what we’re trying to accomplish here is more than cosmetic. This is a functional redesign as well, intended to accommodate the realities of an era when news comes at a hellfire pace. So much of our energy is devoted to breaking stories online, but we don’t want to abandon the things that make the INDY the INDY: the deep dives, the probing feature stories, the thoughtful arts and entertainment coverage.
We had to find a way to do it all.
Our solution is to treat our digital content like a newspaper and our print edition more like a magazine. Online, we’ll break news. In print, we’ll tell compelling stories with longer shelf lives, and we’ll make those stories more appealing.
As magazines often do, we’ve created furniture, or regular featurettes that will appear in most issues: Quickbait, a fast story told visually; A Week in the Life, a recap of the week’s headlines; 15 Minutes (as in, “of fame”), a brief, photo-centric interview; 1,000 Words (as in, “a picture’s worth”), in which Jade Wilson finds a story to tell through photographs.
More is on the way.
We’ve also reorganized our calendars to make them easier to read. Our music calendar is now attached to our music section, and our arts calendar to our arts section. We’ve done away with What to Do This Week; instead, each calendar is designed to guide you through the week’s offerings while still being as comprehensive as possible.
The through-line is that we want these pages to be more reflective of our community. We want to better engage with our audience. We want to find more voices from more walks of life. We want to make this a newspaper for everyone who picks it up, even if they don’t agree with everything we have to say.
We want to challenge, to provoke, to inform, to entertain, to make people laugh.
When we set out to reimagine the INDY, that was my directive: Let’s make a physical newspaper that people can’t wait to read, even when everyone in this industry is telling us that print is dead.
And, well, I think we’ve done it.
For that, all praise goes to our incredible design team, creative director Annie Maynard and graphic designer Rudi Petry, who’ve spent months on this project and, as far as I’m concerned, knocked it out of the park.
Contact editor in chief Jeffrey C. Billman at jbillman@indyweek.com.
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