Keeping in clean in Chicago

I'll be picking a standout page of the week from my daily visits to the many sites where designers display their stuff.

This week:
The Chicago Tribune.

I like the stark clean look of this page today. There's nothing fancy. Just an amazing photo, with a great crop. Those eyes are all I need to enter this page and carry me into the content. That and that excellent hierarchy of headlines. No fancy sidebars, alt presentation of glitzy extras: just good, clean design.

The Chicago Tribune has gotten cleaner and simpler with fresh new flag on Jan. 14, when they ditched the 25-year-old white on blue nameplate, according to the SND Update blog. Here's a clip from a Q&A with the paper's AME of design and architect of the new masthead:

"What was the thinking behind changing the blue background to white in the Tribune's flag?
Joe Knowles: "We felt it was time to update it. Our world has changed quite a bit since we introduced the white-on-blue version 25 years ago. Color was a relatively new thing on Page 1 back then. We knew the blue bar had become a powerful brand identifier for the Tribune... it was originally developed to stand out and be distinctive and it certainly did its job. But it had become overpowering in a way. It was a difficult visual element to overcome on the page. The new one lets the content come forward. That's how we want to distinguish ourselves now."

I couldn't agree more. The page above is a perfect example of how the Tribune is putting content first.