Focus groups will see the first of a series of dummied-up Fairfax tabloids on Monday, designed to gauge reaction to the format chosen for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald (writes Peter Coleman).

Media buyers are already reported to have responded favourably to products shown to them, in advance of the switch from broadsheet, officially set for the beginning of March, but expected to be ahead of schedule.

International newspaper design guru Mario Garcia – who has led the design initiative – told me this week that samples are ready for group market testing, starting next week.

He’s keeping mum about what they look like – Murdoch rival The Australian said one advertising industry executive likened the products to the newly-compact New Zealand Herald – but it would be surprising if Garcia’s personal preferences were not also an influence.

Expect a robust product with as few sections as possible, perhaps only one or two: “The perfect paper should have only one,” says the 65-year-old, who recently halved the number of sections in Spain’s El Tempo. It now has three on weekdays, defined are as ‘must read’, ‘need to read’ and ‘must know’, with edition fronts containing a mix of news.

He favours ‘robust’ because flimsy multi-section papers – he is critical of USA Today – give a wrong impression to readers.

And if there have to be sections, he praises thumb-indexing – possible using the punch technology introduced by inline stitching systems maker Tolerans last year, and already installed in Australia – for its ability to make them more accessible to readers. Section stitching is another option, but both complicate press configurations, and the company has declared its intention to switch production of the metro titles to its regional printing plants, where most equipment is single-width, although there are plans to relocate bigger presses.

Fairfax has already moved many of the sections of its current broadsheet products to tabloid… which it prefers to call by the euphemism ‘compact’ made famous when the London Daily Mail started the trend more than 40 years ago. Like the Mail – and the weekly series I switched to tabloid myself a few years later – Fairfax already has issues with page rates, a debate Garcia didn’t get to in Kuala Lumpur when he addressed WAN-Ifra’s Digital Media Asia conference this week.

Some will say that ‘a page is a page’ and should be sold at the same price as its broadsheet predecessor since “it has the same impact”. But it’s a flawed argument, since the new paper will have twice as number of pages, diminishing the impact of a single page. And – because of the need to provide extra gutters in the tabloid, print area will be slightly reduced.

After 41 years in the industry and 650 newspaper redesigns, Garcia is broadening his reputation to include tablets, which provide “the best opportunity to be a storyteller,” he says. But he is still a fan of the printed product.

“There is a definite place for it,” he says. “Print is eternal. No medium kills another, but time is its enemy.”

Printed newspapers face a very changed role, “in places you cannot imagine” – something he describes as ‘the power of disconnect’ – and he is reconciled to the idea that frequency of print publication may also change.