Well, today is the big day. The New Toronto National Post hit doorsteps across the GTA nation today, with an Amazing New Redesign That Changes Everything. They’ve been advertising it in their paper and others for days now, so I was really excited to see what Canada’s Most Pretentious Newspaper did with itself:

It put its flag down the side. That’s about it.

Calling it a “bold, new design“, the new Post keeps the same headline fonts, same body text font, same flag design (though rotated 90 degrees) and the same elements.

Of course, why should they fix something that isn’t broken? The National Post “earned 38 international design awards from the Society of Newspaper Design (sic), approximately twice the number of any other English-language Canadian newspaper.” — Translation: We beat the Globe and Star, but lost to La Presse.

The only other noticeable design changes are a slight increase in font size, a very noticeable (I might even say excessive) increase in leading (Torontoist has comparison pictures), and a few other so-hard-to-see-that-I-can’t-see-them changes.

The “redesign” also comes with editorial changes, most of which are vaguely described:

• A new section on Mondays dealing with small businesses. (Kind of shocking that they don’t have this already.)
• More “Investing” and “Marketing” coverage in the Financial Post.
• Three new columnists: American atheist and Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Hitchens, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, and This American Life’s ex-Montrealer Jonathan Goldstein. (It’s unclear which of these will write original columns and which are syndicated, but you can take an educated guess.)
• Page Two of each section will be devoted to printing stuff they blogged about the day before. You can see an example in the Arts & Life section with posts from Ampersand.

As part of its Big Launch, the Post even managed to get one of Canada’s TV news networks to do a two-minute package glorifying it. Go ahead, guess which one. If you answered “the one they own”, you’re right.

The Post is seeking comments on its blog. Perhaps I can use the comment feature to get them to stop making crappy videos of talking reporter heads awkwardly reading the articles they just wrote that morning.