I don&8217;t drink coffee, but I&8217;m ready for beignets Monday morning.

That&8217;s the day we first share the redesigned Natchez Democrat with our readers, and we hope all of you will join us at the Marketplace Cafe for coffee, donuts and a newspaper.

You may have to forgive the newsroom staff if we&8217;re a little bleary-eyed that morning &8212; after nine months of working on the project and a Sunday night of designing new pages for the first time, we might be a little tired.

But we will be no less enthusiastic.

Debuting a redesigned Democrat &8212; one with new typefaces, reorganized pages and several new features &8212; has been a long time coming.

The redesign project &8212; about nine months in the making &8212; has involved nearly every department at The Democrat.

We&8217;ve asked readers for their opinions on our content and design, and we&8217;ve consulted other newspapers for their best ideas.

We chose typefaces for stories and headlines that we believe are cleaner and more easily readable.

We&8217;ve incorporated more white space into the design, which gives different elements on the pages more room to breathe.

And we&8217;ve emphasized our focus on local news. In the new design, you&8217;ll notice that datelines &8212; the city name at the beginning of each story identifing its origin &8212;are bolder to key readers in to the content.

We&8217;ve also put a spotlight on good news, something readers tell us they want to see more of. Every front page and every sports page will highlight Who&8217;s News, featuring local achievements.

And on Wednesdays, to get you thinking about the weekend, we&8217;ll have an entertainment calendar to let you know what&8217;s happening around the region.

We have more ways for you to interact with us and with each other, including a daily Web poll whoses results will be published on our opinion page every day. Today&8217;s poll asks what you&8217;d like to see on the Natchez bluffs &8212; a timely topic for many of you.

We&8217;ve reorganized pages, moving obituaries back to the A section &8212; they will be located on page 5A every day, so there&8217;s no more guesswork for readers.

As a result, we&8217;ve shuffled a few other elements around, but we think once everyone gets used to the design it will be much easier to navigate the newspaper every day.

To help get you started, we&8217;ll be publishing a reader guide in Monday&8217;s edition.

It will offer you a diagram of a page, highlighting the changes we made in the design, as well as some navigational tools so you can find your favorite features.

We hope our readers will be able to join us for the debut. If not, we hope you&8217;ll enjoy our new look and new features.

But we also welcome feedback on the design.

So come by and see us from 7:30 to 10 a.m. tomorrow. We&8217;ll have coffee, beignets, newspapers if you haven&8217;t seen them yet, and even some door prizes to give away.

We hope you&8217;ll stop by and let us know what you think about the design. We&8217;re anxious to hear from you.

Kerry Whipple

Bean is editor of The Democrat. She can be reached at 601-445-3541 or by e-mail at

kerry.bean@natchezdemocrat.com

.