design

Links with longer shelf life and less cholesterol than fried butter, as if that's hard:

• Bakersfield paper may shutter community sites: Or may not, depending on which local executive you believe, and which lines you read between, in this PaidContent report.

I often say a key goal of any Web site redesign should be to make the next redesign easier. Given the rapid pace of redesign launches among newspaper.com sites in recent weeks, it appears some last-generation design work was aimed toward that goal.

Charles Apple, one of the primo bloggers at Visual Editors, picked up the discussion about the future of design at newspapers and the troubled Society for News Design, in particular. In Apple's post, he channels Dean Lockwood of the San Antonio Express-News:

While I joined my son yesterday on a college campus visit (yes, he's that old, meaning yes, I'm that old), our gang at Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group rolled out the second site in our latest cycle of user experience upgrades: redding.com, site of the Redding Record-Searchlight in northern California.

As with Site 1, courierpress.com of Evansville, Ind., redding.com demonstrates Scripps' latest thinking about news Web sites, in form and function:

• Flexibility to showcase news of the day.

Links with enough dust on them to prove how far behind I became in reading and blogging:

Design and UX stuff

• Introducing Typekit: Taking advantage of emerging markup/style practices that allow fonts other than the overexposed "Web-safe" selections, this service appears to be the most meaningful development for better Web typography in a long time. (Here's hoping widespread adoption of new font capabilities will make my ancient Text Style Sampler finally obsolete.)

Watch Evansville's courierpress.com site today -- and not just for the likelihood of more severe weather in the southern Ohio Valley, though they get plenty.

No, I refer to a major site redesign; with it, a new user experience architecture. Barring unforeseen delays, it launches today. Update: It went live about 2 p.m. Eastern time.