Perhaps you've noticed, (or maybe you haven't) the Standard is looking a little different this week. After a couple of months, I'm still getting used to this whole managing editor thing, but, after 25 years, one thing I feel pretty comfortable with is graphic design. 

So, this week, I settled back into my comfort zone to introduce a bit of a visual refresh to the newspaper for the first time since I redesigned it in 2014. It's not anything earth-shaking. Like I said, many of you may not have even noticed, and that's OK. The most important thing about newspaper design is to not let the design get in the way of readability. So I've tried to keep everything simple and in service of making the stories as easy to read as possible. To that end, we've kept the body copy and cutlines the same fonts and sizes. 

The most-noticeable difference in the new design is the added emphasis on color-coding the sections with a different color bar at the top of each section. Except for the occasional holiday when we may switch things up, the A section of the paper will have Standard-blue graphics designed to  match our blue newspaper boxes you see around town. The sports section will be Pioneer red. Business pages will be green, the color of money. Classifieds, when run in color, will be gold and entertainment pages, when in color, will have orange graphics. It's not a big thing, but something to give a little personality to the paper and visually separate the sections. 

We're also making added use of gray gradient boxes (like the one you see to the left surrounding Byron York's column) to provide separation between stories. It just feels a little cleaner than using so many lines and boxes to separate things and provides a bit of a visual break from so much black type on white paper. 

I've been the main person responsible for the overall look of the editorial parts of the Southern Standard since 1997. I originally joined the Standard as a senior graphic design student at MTSU after being told by my professor, Ollie Fancher, that a newspaper in my hometown of McMinnville was looking for a designer. Little did I know at the time, that off-hand remark by him would greatly shape my professional career. 

Looking back over the years at some of my designs, some have been pretty good and some I'd rather not remember. Hopefully you like (or, at least, don't hate) the changes. Change can always be tricky, but everything we do is done in an attempt to make reading the Standard and getting your local news as easy and enjoyable as possible. Hopefully, this new look and other slight tweaks coming down the road do that and provide a little enhanced visual value to reading the physical edition or viewing the PDF pages on our website as opposed to just reading stories on a web page. 

As always, thanks for reading.

Standard managing editor Seth Wright can be reached at (931) 473-2191.