If you don’t like today’s redesign of The Independent, don’t worry. History suggests there’ll be another one along soon enough.

By most counts this is the fifth time in as many years that the title has put on a fresh set of clothes in a bid to change its fortunes. That’s roughly the same rate that Chelsea appoints new managers.

On the one hand I’m annoyed because it means I have to produce yet another set of Indy-style templates for our student’s news days.

But actually, I rather like this new look for a number of reasons:

1. The sideways titlepiece.
   Yes it’s a gimmick, but it’s a point of differentiation that will undoubtedly cement itself in reader’s minds. I wonder how long they’ll manage to resist filling that white space above the dateline and next to the eagle logo, though.
2. The return of the traditional titlepiece typeface.
   I thought it a terrible mistake that the previous redesign replaced the most noticable element of Independent ‘branding’ – the black serif typeface it had used to identify itself since its launch in 1986 – with a less classy red sans face. This new version reverses that.
3. Headline leading.
   My other big beef about the previous design was the design decision to apply very narrow leading measures to news headlines. On most days this meant horrible ascender/descender clashes on various pages. The new design allows headlines to properly breathe.
4. Six column-grid.
   
   This is perhaps the most significant aspect of the new design. Every other national newspaper with a compact format uses a 5-column grid for its news pages. The Indy’s new look opts for a 6-column format – obviously making for narrower columns, which could have the effect of far busier-looking pages. It counters this with a judicious use of half-columns for picture captions, pull quotes etc which break up the pages rather elegantly.
5. Magazine feel for features.
   The new ‘Section 2’ feature well of the newspaper uses a 4-column grid to give a more of a magazine feel to those longer reads.  For these pages, though, I think they should drop those keylines between columns.

Overall, I think the new Indy has a classier feel, and the design allows it to make more of  its dwindling resources.

A redesign will never, in itself, transform the fortunes of a newspaper (although the Indy’s change of format from broadsheet to compact in 2003 did give it a spectacular short-term boost). Existing readers either don’t notice, or get grumpy about things like the crossword moving.

New readers are only likely to arrive if there is a massive marketing push to back it up – or a price reduction to undercut the opposition. With The Times still 40p per day cheaper, I doubt we’ll see much of a dramatic shift in ABC figures – however well received this particular revamp proves to be with readers.