Media

Easy on the eyes

by Dan Kennedy

There were still two "A" sections on Wednesday, and there are now ads on the formerly pristine territory of pages two and three. So the new design hasn't solved all the Boston Globe's formatting problems, and in one respect the paper has actually lost ground.

But give the folks at 135 Morrissey Boulevard this much: the new body and headline type, called Miller, is just about the most readable, attractive font my aging eyes have seen in a daily newspaper. This isn't just an improvement over the previous typeface; it's stunning, so clear and crisp that it's hard to believe it's actually smaller than the previous font. (Note to type junkies: I know I'm improperly mixing and matching the words "font" and "typeface." You lost that battle in the late 1980s, when the desktop-publishing revolution made them interchangeable, at least in common usage.)

There will be time enough over the next few weeks to judge the new design and the new sections, and to analyze whether they'll help revitalize a paper that has seemed for the past couple of years to be in the midst of an identity crisis.

But the Globe got a crucial part of it right.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.dankennedy.net

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