TORONTO—Free urban daily 24 Hours unveiled a new design last week with film premiere-themed events at high traffic points in downtown Toronto. The redesign was completed by Montreal-based Cyclone Design and it all started, says Chris Brockbank, vice-president of marketing with Sun Media, because of an online panel. “We have been doing some baseline studies over the last year and it was becoming apparent to us that there was a lot of change that readers were looking for,” he says. “The redesign included both content changes and design changes.”


Cyclone Design senior graphic designer Caroline Desrosiers, with the help of designer Amelie Fleurant, redesigned the newspaper’s layout. The logo was created by Cyclone Design senior graphic designer Benoit Marion.

Two new fonts were chosen for the paper — National, a sans serif for headlines, and Sentinel, a slab serif for body text. Brockbank explains they wanted the fonts to be fresh and new, so they went with something outside the Sun Media family of fonts. “We wanted something like people are used to seeing online,” he says. “And we wanted to distance ourselves from our Sun Media family members that use traditional print fonts. We wanted to go outside the two-thousand fonts that we already had and make new fonts for this publication.”

A palette of four colours was chosen for the daily, says Desrosiers. Orange is in keeping with the old 24 Hours logo and it’s a colour that appears on every page. As well, blue, green and red are used for the different sections. Desrosiers says the biggest change in the new design came from the resizing of the paper, which was shortened by an inch. Because of the new size and the strong presence of advertising in the book they chose a clean and simple grid. “Because it is used by six different graphic teams in six different towns across Canada, the grid must not be interpreted,” says Desrosiers.
Contact: 24hrs.ca, Cyclonedesign.ca