The Daily Tar Heel
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The Daily Tar Heel

What you get with a redesigned DTH

The Daily Tar Heel launches its first major redesign since 2003

Photo: Beatrice Moss and Kelly McHugh

Beatrice Moss and Kelly McHugh
Senior designer and design editor

You may have noticed that the paper looks a little different today. It’s not a mistake. We’ve been working on a redesign for more than a year.

We’ve gone through multiple versions, dozens of mock-ups and several test prints to make sure that we have everything covered. For the past few weeks, we’ve debated headline position, shades of blue and red, column width and other details of the newspaper’s design.

Our goals for this new design were threefold: to make the paper more engaging for our readers, to better accommodate our content and to update our overall look.

To reach these goals, we’ve added more space around stories, made text left-aligned instead of justified and introduced longer “read-ins” to give more information than headlines alone.

We’ve also brought back the bottom quote. This feature, which alumni may remember, adds a light-hearted element to our top news page. The quote will be selected by a member of our staff each night and will be exclusive to the print edition.

You may wonder why we’re launching the new look at the end of the semester. We’ve realized the benefits of it, and wanted to present it to our readers as soon as we were done. This step represents a great accomplishment for our staff.

Still, we’re always trying new things to enhance the DTH. We’ll continue to fine-tune our design in the weeks and months ahead.

We heard the advice of DTH staff members and local professionals to get to this point.

But the most important voice is a reader’s. Send us an email if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

Contact the Design Desk at design@dailytarheel.com.

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