New year, new look for Inter Lake
New year, new look! That’s the slogan we are using to introduce our modest redesign, the results of which can be seen in today's print edition of the Daily Inter Lake.
You’ll notice that our name at the top of the page is a bit cleaner. Gone are those smoke-blue mountains that we’ve featured in our nameplate for most of the past 15 years. Gone also, except on Sunday, are the story teasers at the top of the page.
We’re going for a more refined, bold look that will also incorporate lots of small changes to help direct our readers more efficiently to the news that interests them.
That also meant changing our headline styles and fonts. We know most readers don’t care about whether they are reading a serif font or a sans-serif font, bold, condensed or light — but we do think you want to have an easy-to-read newspaper, and that was our aim with this redesign.
You’ll also notice lots of changes throughout the paper in the way pages look, especially in our page headings and logos. The Flathead Business Journal also has been redesigned, which you will get to take a look at on Jan. 21 when the next issue comes out.
Credit for doing the actual hard work on this comprehensive redesign goes to Heidi Gaiser, our business editor and sometime page editor. With lots of input from the publisher, other editors and the rest of the staff, Heidi worked tirelessly to make the design of the paper more functional as well as to make the look more contemporary and stylish.
We think she did a great job.
There also will be some exciting changes in content coming in the new year to help reflect changes in our community and in our reader’s interests.
On Wednesdays each week, we will add a new page following the Valley page that will “Focus” on one community in Northwest Montana. That starts this week with a Focus on Whitefish in the lead-up to the Winter Carnival.
On Thursday, we will introduce a new columnist on our editorial page. Gene Lyons writes a column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that is syndicated nationally by United Media, and provides a liberal counterpoint to our Thomas Sowell column, which runs on Tuesdays.
Like Sowell, Lyons is direct and to the point. You may not always agree with him, but you will understand what he is saying.
Also coming on Thursdays will be additional content in This Week in the Flathead. Starting this week, we will begin to include more features about trendlines in pop culture, including top videos, albums, concert tours, books and movies.
We’ve made a commitment to expand This Week in the Flathead by four additional pages on Jan. 24, allowing us to add video game reviews and the popular Mobilewalla column that gives smartphone users weekly updates on the best and newest apps.
By the way, if you love the “Front and Center” history feature that has been a standard fixture on the Daily Inter Lake’s front page for a couple of decades, don’t panic: We’ve just moved it to Page A2, where it will be located every day under the Daybook.
For you history junkies — and we know you are out there — this is actually great news, because news from the Inter Lake “100 Years Ago” now will be in every day’s print edition, instead of just when we have ads on the front page.
Oh yeah, and to brighten your day, we are adding the Kit ‘N’ Carlyle comic by Larry Wright as a regular feature in our daily Classifieds section. Kit ‘N’ Carlyle will run Monday through Saturday. Take a look. It should give you a chuckle.
Please, let us know what you think about these changes by writing or calling me or other staff members — we always love to hear from our readers.
Managing editor Frank Miele may be reached at 758-4447 or by email at edit@dailyinterlake.com.