NEW YORK — As The Wall Street Journal gears up to unveil its much-awaited new look on Tuesday, it has been offering a peek into the secretive design process with a series of ads showing proposals that didn't make the cut:
A supermarket tabloid with screaming headlines like "Aliens in $300 Million Takeover Bid for NASA."
A glossy women's magazine with stories on the "100 Cutest Brokers on Wall Street" and stock tips from the "staff astrologer."
A comic book featuring the Masked Monetarist, a fearless, muscle-bound protector of the money supply.
OK, so none of the proposals was serious. But they did make for an eye-catching ad campaign in trade journals that built up buzz about the paper's first major design change since World War II.
Most importantly, the ads convey the mission of the redesign itself — to help The Wall Street Journal change its image, bring in new readers and better serve the readers it already has with a format that's more modern, nicer to look at, easier to read and easier to navigate.
Mitchell Engelmeyer, the paper's creative director of marketing, said the paper has been working for years to reverse the perception that its writing is inaccessible and tightly focused on Wall Street. The new design, and the way it's being positioned in the marketplace, should help change that, he said.
"We've had a lot of positive feedback from people in the industry," Engelmeyer said of the ad campaign. "They say it's a good thing for the Journal to show that it can laugh at itself. But it also speaks to the changes going on at the Journal, to make it more friendly and easier to read."
Regular readers of the Journal already know it features a humorous story on the front page every day. But since that front page is nearly solid gray text dotted with just a few drawings and graphs, Engelmeyer acknowledges that "it's often seen as a gray exterior that is hard to penetrate."
Taking advantage of a four-year upgrade to their printing plants that was completed earlier this year, Journal executives spent the past 18 months developing a new look that includes more photos and graphics, redrawing its Scotch Roman typeface and adding more color.
But the Journal is also treading carefully in making the changes so as not to upset its 1.8 million readers. Now an icon of American journalism, the Journal's classic six-column front page looks essentially the same as it did in 1942, when the current design was put in place. The new design will include color on the front page for the first time.
The Journal has been keeping a tight lid on what exact design changes are in store, and Steven Goldstein, a spokesman for Dow Jones & Co., which publishes the paper, said the design work has been done in a secure room to which other staffers don't have access.
In the end, "when people wake up Tuesday morning they will still recognize The Wall Street Journal, but it will be easier to navigate and a little less intimidating," Goldstein said. "But the content is not changing and the hard news will remain."
The redesign effort was overseen by Joanne Lipman, a deputy managing editor at the paper, and Joe Dizney, the paper's in-house design guru. Lipman and Dizney both worked on the last major update that the Journal undertook, the highly successful Weekend Journal that debuted in 1998.
"I was basically trying to clear up years of non-design," Dizney said. "For years it had been designed by default, and I wanted to clean things up. We didn't want to lose that 19th century character, but we wanted to open it up a little bit, to give it a little air."
Dizney worked closely with Garcia-Media, a noted newspaper design firm that has done consulting work with more than 400 newspapers worldwide. Its founder, Mario Garcia, called the Journal's redesign one of the biggest challenges he had ever undertaken given the paper's long history.
"Most papers have parents, but this one has grandfathers and great- grandfathers," said Garcia, who has also consulted the Journal on the redesign of its Asian and European editions.
Garcia said he dug into the paper's past to find design elements to bring back, including diamond-shaped markers that appeared in 1930s. He said the goal was to make the paper look more contemporary and yet also remain faithful to its roots, which go back to 1889.
One of the biggest changes is a new section, Personal Journal, which will appear on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and include articles on how the day's news has direct impact on readers' lives. It will also feature articles on what editors there call the "second shift" — the part of life that begins outside the office, things like health, personal finance, cars and travel.
In addition to bringing in new readers, the paper is also hoping to bring in new advertisers, especially in areas such as luxury goods, which the paper feels are "underrepresented," Goldstein says. The Journal's competition is also watching keenly. Last week The New York Times, which goes up against the Journal for national advertising, announced a new weekend travel and auto section on Fridays as well as the expansion of several sections currently only seen in the Northeast to its national edition.