A fresh new look for Green Pages
By Deirdre Helfferich and Ryan Stoy
Green Pages Board

Readers familiar with past issues of Green Pages can hardly fail to notice our new look. Greg Everett created Green Pages' new website, www.gp.org/greenpages/, which inspired the new design, created by layout editor Deirdre Helfferich and graphic designer Ryan Stoy. It is an attempt to give Green Pages a fresh and professional look in keeping with our status as the party of the future.

In redesigning Green Pages the editorial board had three goals: the simplest being to make the paper more visually appealing; to project an image consistent with the mission of Green Pages; and to create visual continuity between the print version of Green Pages and the paper's online version. In discussions about a new design, it became apparent that for the redesign to be successful the editorial board had to address the publication's communication objectives. While Green Pages has been published for eight years, its growth was spontaneous and its design in relation to its purpose never directly addressed. Questions came up: Is Green Pages a newspaper or a magazine? Is it a propaganda tabloid for facilitating a contact network and the growth of state parties or an independent journal covering news about the Green Party? Should our headlines be intriguing or informative? Should Green Pages be an open forum or a more traditional periodical? Should it concentrate more on elections and ballot access or on the Ten Key Values as practiced by Greens across the country? Should it be published less or more frequently?

The board was not in complete agreement on these questions, naturally, but our editorial policy, previously approved by the Coordinating Committee of the GP-US, and our discussions helped to clarify our purpose and the image we wish to project.

Green Pages, we determined, is a quarterly newspaper, focusing on news of the Green Party, and addressing the needs of Green Party members by sharing successes, contacts, and other information to make the party stronger. To do this effectively, Green Pages needs to reflect the basic premise of the Green Party; namely, that we are a viable alternative to traditional parties and represent the politics of choice for those committed to building a sustainable, just and vibrant society. In short, our goal was to make Green Pages even greener.

Of course, the first and most basic place to incorporate Green values into Green Pages is in its physical production. We print our paper as before with soy ink on recycled paper in a union shop. The sections of the paper remain the same (Features, Elections, Opinion, World, Contacts, Reports), but we have added a culture (Evergreen) section that will concentrate on a different aspect of Green culture every quarter, from the arts to mediation to Green youth to bike libraries and other Green projects. Finally, to update the paper's appearance, we added more green to the cover, gave it a bolder look and changed the page orientation to magazine style, while inside we streamlined the layout. The editorial board hopes these changes enhance Green Pages and result in a publication that Greens find useful and are proud to call their own.

Comments or suggestions on the new design? Contact us at greenpages@greens.org!

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