The Evening Standard launched a new paper design on Monday as part of a larger shake up trying to increase its readership of 500,000. The sales of the paper have been declining ever since the free papers, London Paper and London Lite started appearing in the afternoons. Since the paper was bought from the Mail the new editor Geordie Greig has been trying to distance the paper from its old right-wing, negative stance. The first step as mentioned in Evening Standard was this advertising campaign, designed to get us talking about the Evening Standard.

The next step launched on Monday when London was invaded with orange Evening Standard distributors, who for one day only were, handing the paper out for free, an obvious gimmick but perhaps a great way for people to see what they’re missing, only time will tell.

So let’s jump in and compare the old ES to the new. The first difference you notice is the banner no longer stretches across the top of the paper, going for more of a London Lite look, I’m not sure I agree with this decision and I definitely don’t like the way the London is placed in between the ascenders of ‘Evening’. Of course it’s good to see London appear on the front page, this was after all THE London paper. Apart from the banner there is a much better use of colour and the typography is more modern and less stuffy looking. The colour palette led with orange is much more positive, headings in capitals creates tighter leading and use of negative space is much improved.

The paper is bigger than it used to be 72 pages on Monday and 64 on Tuesday compared to only 56 in the previous week. However, when you open the paper up it seems lighter, the type size is bigger and there are more generous margins, although seemingly based on the same grid. I think the affect of larger type actually makes the paper seem less in-depth and more like the at-a-glance stories of the other afternoon papers. Headings are better though opting, like The Guardian, for one typeface in multiple weights to differentiate stories.

Is it enough though in an age when even an afternoon paper isn’t as up-to-date as the internet or even evening news and the radio? I’m not so sure. The London Lite and London Paper are awful papers, filled with celebrity gossip and bite-size news. The Evening Standard is better, with much more news and better writing, it’s a thicker paper too, about the twice the size, which is great for some analysis of the days’ news on the evening commute. However I think the ES needed to go further to differentiate, adopt the much better berliner format and truly make it an evening paper for the broadsheet readers.