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A new look for The Aspen Times

By now you’ve noticed that The Aspen Times looks different Wednesday (actually, Web readers won’t notice many changes ” it’s a print thing). The big nameplate at the top of the front page has changed, along with a number of other things that you might not be able to identify right away.

In newspaper-ese it’s called a redesign, and we’ve been quietly working on it with our consultants, Creative Circle Media Consulting, for more than a year. We hope it makes the paper easier for you to navigate and to read; we also hope the paper appears a little cleaner and more professional.

As a rule, newspapers update their designs every five to 10 years, but here at The Aspen Times we’ve been a bit lazy in this regard. The Aspen Times Weekly was overhauled in the mid-1990s and again in early 2005, but our daily newspaper hasn’t received a top-to-bottom makeover in roughly 15 years.



It’s not that we didn’t like the old design, but the world has changed, Aspen has changed and consumers are more visually savvy than ever before. We felt it was time for a new look.

Discerning readers will notice that the type in the newspaper looks different, from the headlines to the photo captions to the text of the stories. The color purple (see the word “Aspen” in the nameplate above, or the facade of our building on Main Street) is repeated in various places throughout the paper, as is a complementary tan.




Headlines are supposed to summarize stories and tell readers what a story’s about; from now on, we will add an explanatory summary at the top of most stories. Our letters to the editor will be presented differently as well. Please take a look.

Down the road, we hope to add more charts, graphs and maps to help readers understand the news. This is not an attempt to do away with stories or add needless bells and whistles, but to tell each story in the most effective way; if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the occasional chart or “info box” is often better than a mass of gray text.

Anyway, we hope you like the redesign and we invite your feedback. You can post a comment on the web version of this story (aspentimes.com), mail us a letter, call us at 925-3414 or send an e-mail to Editor Bob Ward at bward@aspentimes.com.

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