I wanted to know how our Sunday paper - The Observer - struck an intelligent 16-year-old. So today I found the required teenager and confined her to the kitchen table with a pen and paper. She drew a line down the middle of the paper. One side was headed “like” and the other “don’t like”.

It wouldn’t be worth mentioning here, had the result not been dominated by design.

I am always preaching the astonishing increase in the power of visual communication since I have been in newspapers. It has gone from not  mattering very much, to mattering more than anything — in under 20 years. One very senior publisher said to me a few months back: “All the papers have pretty much the same stuff in them these days. The only thing that distinguishes them is the design”.

Right at the top of the list of our teenager’s likes was the design of The Observer. She liked the strong section titles and the clarity of the organisation of the paper. She liked the sans font for the display text. She liked the expansive, confident photography on the section fronts.

“The whole look is clear and modern without seeming frivolous or gaudy”. Particular praise was heaped upon the strong use of colour: the colour rules across the tops of the pages and colour type for the quotes.  As for navigation, she liked the large page numbers which make it easier to find the desired place.

As for the reading matter, she was most impressed by the Observer Magazine. “The articles are all good - original and not too dark and serious. I like Art Attack and Show & Tell and First Person. Above all I liked Fashion and My Favourite Outfit because they are not telling you what to wear, which is usually boring and annoying, but showing different and individual styles.”

Among other articles that caught the teenage eye was the piece about cellphone novelists in the New York Times section.

Just about the only thing our focus grouper did not like was another design point. “Why are some of the section titles designed differently from others? Sport has dotted rules, Review has lines and Business/Media is completely different. This is pointless and most annoying!”

Note to self: we at Shakeup Media must get more imaginative at using colour.

Entry Filed under: Media, Newspapers