February 5, 2010
New London freesheet
I pride myself on being positive here on magCulture. It would be easy to take cheap shots at new projects.
But London Weekly, a new free newspaper launched today, really is shockingly poor. I didn’t last year’s redesign of the long-standing London daily Evening Standard was a great step forward for newspaper design, but this new weekly plumbs new depths, leaving the Standard up there with… well, just about any professionally executed newspaper.
Previous free newspapers in London weren’t great design either, but benfited from being good enough. That is, they looked better than you expected from a freebie. Sadly, the London Weekly looks exactly what you expect from a freebie.
View the pages one by one here.
7 Comments
Comment on February 5, 2010 by mat says:
It looks shockingly bad.
In fact it would be hard to make it look worse. You would think that a small part of the £5.5m launch budget would have gone towards making their product look professional.
I would be upset if my fish and chips were wrapped in it.
Comment on February 5, 2010 by Alan Formby-Jackson » Blog Archive » The London Weekly launches… and it looks grim says:
[...] can see more over at The Guardian here and at the magCulture blog here if you can bear [...]
Comment on February 5, 2010 by simonkirrane says:
Laughably bad, like a brilliant parody of a terrible, terrible newspaper. Plus there are widows everywhere, hyphenation on words of six letters, standfirsts that go on for days. I just read of “the first throws [sic] of passion”…
Check out this header:
Ten Romantic
Getwaways For February.
The Winter Blues
or this:
Drivers Scarily Complacent About Dangerous Vehicles Says Brake and Direct line
What does any of that mean? Has this been badly translated?
Comment on February 5, 2010 by mat says:
Maybe it’s been outsourced like a call center?
Has to be an excellent hoax.
Comment on February 5, 2010 by Woz says:
> “hyphenation on words of six letters”… oooooooooo! call the cops!
Comment on February 7, 2010 by Daniel Bower says:
I’ve not seen the mag yet, but after seeing the website yesterday I didn’t have particularly high hopes.
The padding around images, the carousel at the top, the awful ad integration. How is anyone supposed to take this seriously?
Comment on February 8, 2010 by Dave B says:
Oh dear. There really are people who think that newspaper design doesn’t really matter to readers and is something only journalists notice, but this proves that theory wrong. Pages have to be attractive or they just look like ad sheets, and that’s what this paper looks like. I presume they’ve got sixth form students designing it. No-one appears to be proofing it either!
