Fairfax is not simply redesigning its metro dailies, but “rethinking how they produce their newspaper in the landscape of the media quartet,” says international designer Mario Garcia.

The company launched dummy versions of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday to show media and advertisers what the new ‘compact’ papers – due to appear next Monday – will look like.

Says Garcia, “You will see a front page with great use of photos, story summaries, and then, as you open the newspaper, the big topic of the day.”

He worked closely with the SMH and The Age team on the switch to tabloid: “My work was primarily with art director Matt Martel, who has done a great job of putting it all together.”

While the dummies carry the March 4 dateline, the SMH sample works with Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of the September 14 poll. A single banner headline is in a sharper version of the newspaper’s traditional bold serif style, with straps, tags and tasters in a contrasting block-serif. And note the detail – on bylines, turn lines, name-tags and even a reversed drop capital for the Peter Hartcher commentary which also starts on the front page. A conservative element is the retention of the full ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ masthead.

I liked The Age less: Not because of its cleaner, more modern masthead package, but for the way in which it seems to lose the plot further down; cluttered by extra headline elements (some in mixed typefaces), the weather and ‘odd spot’ and what appear to by mini ad spaces.

Body type is marginally larger, and stories are to be almost a third shorter, although Fairfax says the number in each issue will not change.

At Friday’s launch, the discussion of page advertising rates, ‘neuro-testing’ and not calling the products ‘tabloids’ to some extent distracted attention from basic issues with the reformatting of these flagship titles: In many respects, the new-look  newspapers seemed a missed opportunity.

Perhaps this is a ploy to mislead rival News Limited – which played down the announcement on its website – and next week’s ‘real editions’ will be different; perhaps – as Garcia suggests – the inside pages will be more ambitious. My feeling is that the obsession with not “changing the tone” – expressed by Fairfax Media’s metro media editorial director Garry Linnell – appears to have limited the scope of the redesign, which is even reminiscent of the Budget-day tabloids Fairfax produced last year.

The switch in format – unambitiously for Monday to Friday newspapers only – follows market research which included ‘neuro-testing’, in which readers’ brainwaves were monitored. Research had told the company they could not change the tone of their papers, Linnell says.

Saturday’s broadsheet products may remain until Fairfax shuts down its metro printing plants in Chullora, Sydney and Tullamarine, Melbourne in June 2014, after which time they might be significantly more difficult to produce on the regional plants earmarked for the job.

Supporting the case for keeping page advertising rates the same as before – even though they are half the size and there are potentially twice as many – advertising strategy director Sarah Keith says eye-tracking research had shown the smaller pages attracted a 50 per cent improvement in ‘eye-gaze’. Online, that brought a query on whether they would offer a discount on broadsheet pages sold in the last 150 years.

News website home pages are being redesigned the day before the format change and Fairfax says “a more extensive redesign” will follow.

Mario Garcia told GXpress he was honoured to work with the Fairfax team, led by Martel. “I think this is a great new chapter for two iconic Australian dailies that now are not simply redesigning, but rethinking how they produce their newspaper in the landscape of what I call the media quartet: mobile, online, print and tablet editions.

“We have analysed ways to make the reading experience more pleasant, faster, using some of the navigational tools that we know print readers bring from their digital experiences.”

Garry Linnell said market testing brought the “overwhelming reaction” from readers of ‘what took you so long?’. I hope their further reaction will not be to ask why the opportunity to create a more modern product was knocked back.

Peter Coleman