United Kingdom tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mirror, called in an army of designers to give the 105-year-old publication a fresh new look. The new look is an attempt to end a 40-year identity crisis brought on by the relaunch of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun in 1969. Since then, The Daily Mirror has struggled to define itself against its old rival.

The Mirror’s associate editor led the paper through the 18-month design process, with Trinity Mirror hiring Spanish design firm Cases Associats. The paper held focus groups and found that while loyal readers could see the difference in appearance and values compared with The Sun, occasional buyers could not. Some have called The Mirror’s new look magazine-like with its entirely different fonts, headings, full-color pages, icons, graphics, and more coherent features section such as Your Life, a women’s features section modeled on women’s glossy magazines.

The Mirror’s web site is also being redeveloped and is expected to be relaunched this year. The paper’s design team now treats stories according to what is deemed “important” and “interesting.” For lighter human interest and showbiz stories, the headlines are italics and pictures are bigger. For serious, hard new, color is still used but the headlines are straighter and there is more text.

Canon have added the imagePRESS C6000/C6000VP to their imagePRESS range. These new machines have print speeds of 60 ppm and up to 300 gsm and are more affordable than the imagePRESS C7000 while still maintaining the same high durability and productivity.

Canon has established themselves in the market of digital production printing with the previous imagePRESS range and decided to broaden their range releasing the imagePRESS C6000 and C6000VP. These machines incorporate the V-Toner, E-Drum and T-Developer, which work with an Advanced Image Transfer Belt and an oil-less Twin Fusing system. They can reach speeds of 60 ppm with resolution of up to 1200 dpi. The imagePRESS C6000 and C6000VP could take color digital production printing to a whole new and more affordable level.

These machines are aimed primarily for corporate print room and pay for print markets, but with the more affordable pricing compared to the imagePRESS C7000, the imagePRESS C6000/VP could reach more markets than was ever thought possible. It can potentially print, uninterrupted, for two hours as their maximum media supply is 10,000 sheets.

The Print Space offers instructions on its web site on subjects ranging from monitor calibration to building color profiles and soft-proofing at home, enabling users at any level to learn more about color management. In addition to Epson Giclee (inkjet) prints, theprintspace.com offers affordable digital C-Type prints that are genuine wet lab prints exposed by a real photographic process.

The Print Space’s digital C-type professional photographic prints are produced on a Chromira, which is a professional quality, color-managed, high resolution print device producing exhibition quality archival prints suitable for the professional art market on Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Professional paper. A straightforward web ordering process allows clients to send disks to the lab or to upload digital files directly via a built-in secure file transfer system. Instead of waiting days for digital prints, files can be transferred, printed and returned within 72 hours.

The company’s ethos is to give creative control back to individuals and also give them access to the kind of high-end equipment which currently only the most successful photographic and creative companies can afford.

The Sunday Times will launch its long-awaited full-color redesign on July 6, 2008 with a new masthead, new font and updated slogan. It will also introduce a redesign across all sections of the paper except for the Sunday Times Magazine and the Culture magazine. They will be redesigned at a later date.

According to the Sunday Times editor, the changes will make the paper bolder and brighter while still retaining its authority. The plan is to use color to rid the paper of its greyness and revitalize the newsprint sections. The masthead has been tweaked, maintaining the paper’s traditional look and the typeface will be a customized font designed for the paper.

The redesign was masterminded by Al Trivino, the art director for News International projects, and Tristan Davies, the former editor of the Independent on Sunday who was hired as Sunday Times executive editor in February. The paper will also introduce blogs by some of its star columnists on the TimesOnline website. The paper’s price would not rise in the near future. This redesign came after the Mail on Sunday relaunched at the start of 2008 in color.

Stamen is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001 and in the business of commissioning web sites. They have worked with the likes of Yahoo!, Schwab, and has an ongoing relationship with BMW’s Designworks division, for which they created an internal, online collaboration tool allowing workers to share project information. Recently, they worked with digg.com, for which they created Digg Labs, making animated images that illustrate what news stories users find interesting.

Digg Arc is an eye-catching application that is a dynamic, fresh way of presenting how people consume information online. For example, the title of a story is posted in the middle of a circle that pops up against a black background. Around the title, in the form of ray-like lines, appear the screen names of readers who “digg” the story. More popular stories have more rays, which appear in vivid hues.

This is one example of Stamen’s attempts to prod web site visitors to explore data on their own. They call it “exploratory navigation.” The hope is that users will be encouraged to take an intuitive approach to finding information, rather than following a prescribed path.