Hasta La Ideas

The Independent launches i today, its new daily newspaper “designed for people with busy, modern lives”. But regardless of who it’s aimed at, what is it for, exactly?

In championing i (and yes, it’s already getting the blood up squinting at all the lowercase “i”s that dot this post), editor-in-chief Simon Kelner claims the 20p title is “the first quality daily paper to be launched in Britain for 25 years” and that it is “colourful and accessible, concise and intelligent.”

It is all these things, in part, but it also desperately wants to be heavyweight within the confines of a “lite” delivery. And the results are confusing.

On first look, the pages are very busy, with ubiquitous splashes of colour making the uniformity of black and white newsprint now seem even more like a distant memory. There are also small boxes of text and tabs everywhere, that are more familiar to the design of news online.

The point being that i’s content is intended to be consumed in a small amout of time. The News Matrix (shown below, with an inexplicable picture of Jeremy Clarkson) thus provides 15 stories over a spread; each a mere 40-word paragraph.

So from this opening spread it very quickly feels like a freesheet.

And perhaps this isn’t surprising given that Alexander Lebedev, the owner of The Independent and Independent on Sunday since March, famously turned The Evening Standard into a giveaway when he acquired it last year.

But does i really offer a quick-fix version of The Independent? There are opinion pieces for sure, but with news pages that segue a story on whether Bert from Sesame Street is actually gay with a smaller piece on the re-examination of the Nazi foreign ministry, it’s much nearer Metro territory than it thinks.

The more successful sections are, unsurprisingly, the ones devoid of boisterous advertising.

A Health spread, despite some ugly pull quotes, at least gives the impression that there’s a more in-depth feature to be read, whereas the tiny reviews in the “i arts” section offer little of substance, no matter how rushed your commute might be.

The Business section seems to offer the most coherence design-wise, however, perhaps because it only features two ads over its five pages.

But in trying to create a reading experience that fits in with the pace of contemporary life, it seems that i, for now, merely adds more confusion to it.

We’ll keep an, um, eye on how the paper looks over the next few months. In the face of ever-growing news consumption online and via mobile apps, it will be interesting to see just how digestable this Independent Lite really is.

Competition: speaking of volcanos (see our earlier story), we’ve teamed up with Today Designers in the Netherlands to give away five copies of their Volcanobook, featuring a cover printed in volcanic ash.

The book contains an essay on the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland earlier this year, which resulted in a cloud of ash drifting into European airspace and grounding flights (see our story here), plus work by designers and illustrators on the theme of volcanoes.

To enter this competition email your name, age, gender, occupation, and delivery address and telephone number to competitions@dezeen.com with “Volcanobook” in the subject line. We won’t pass your information on to anyone else; we just want to know a little about our readers.

Read our privacy policy here.

Competition closes 9 November 2010. Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Here are some more details from Today Designers:

I would like to inform you about The Volcanobook, a limited edition from Today Designers about the Icelandic volcano eruption, printed with volcano-ash (see attachments). Perhaps you can give this creative project some publicity on dezeen?

The idea started when the Eyjó-ashcloud hit Europe in april 2010 for several weeks. Everyone was complaining about it and we felt the urge to turn it into something possitive. With the help of internet we contacted Icelandic people who work or live close to the volcano area. We asked them to send a bag of volcano-ash to Holland so we could turn it into a workable ink for print. We used this ash to create a beautiful illustration on the book cover.

In The Volcanobook information and creation come together. A volcanologist researched this ash and wrote an article about it. Futher many designers and illustrators contribute with an inspirational artwork about Iceland or the volcano. The first 500 copies are in Dutch. We are working on a complete english edition as well.

The book presentation is on thursday the 14th of october in the Hot Ice gallery in Amsterdam. The mayor of the Iceland volcano area will present the first copy of the book. His name is: Ísólfur Gylfi Pálmason and he is the mayor of Hvolsvöllur, a little village counting 850 people.

Without getting up from your chair, do you know exactly where:

• your keys are?
• your 2009 tax documents are?
• your car’s registration is? (If you own a car.)
• your winter gloves are?
• your social security card is?
• your flashlight is?
• your phone charger is?

How did you do? Were you able to answer at least five of the questions exactly? All seven? One?

Except for your keys and maybe your phone charger, you’re probably okay with not knowing exactly where the other items on this list are currently located. However, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to waste time hunting for these items the next time you need them?

What do you need to do to find a place for all your possessions and have everything in its place? Do you need to file your important papers? Switch out your winter and summer clothes? Set up a reception station in your home with a place to store your keys each evening and charge your phone? Clean out your bedside table and make a storage place for a flashlight?

If you know where all seven items on the list are located, is there anything in your home that doesn’t have a permanent home that should? What items are constantly out of place in your home and might need a new permanent place to live?

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Il nostrano Riccardo Bucchioni ha disegnato questa tees intitolata ‘Know Your Nerds’ per Threadless. La trovate qui.