You probably noticed that your newspaper looks different today.

For the past six months, we have been working with Indiana newspaper designer Jennifer George-Palilonis to make the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel easier to read and "fresher" looking. Today, we introduce more color throughout our newspapers, more headlines, story indexes and a cleaner look.

When a newspaper does a total makeover -- rethinking everything from the front page to the last, and often re-arranging items -- that is called a "redesign" in our industry's parlance. We did not launch a redesign today.

Rather, our editors and George-Palilonis felt the newspapers already were well-organized. Our market research from 2007 found a high degree of reader satisfaction in our local-news coverage and our newspapers in general. Our "penetration," a statistic that measures how many people in our markets read our newspapers on a weekly or daily basis, is one of the highest in the United States. That's not something to fool with.

Still, we wanted to improve visually. Last summer, when we contacted George-Palilonis about helping us, she quickly agreed that our newspapers started from a strong base.

"Of all the papers I've worked with, I felt that these in particular had a good foundation to start with," said Palilonis, who has helped 25 newspapers redesign or make design improvements. "But they needed an injection of lively use to give the papers more context visually."

It might sound like window dressing, but it is not. Americans, in part due to heavier use of computers and the Internet, increasingly demand attractive visuals and appearance in most everything they buy. That includes newspapers.

George-Palilonis said readers subconsciously know that good newspaper design and good journalism go hand-in-hand. How an article is presented, from the headlines to the photos and graphics to the writing of the story, is all part of a reader's newspaper experience, she said.

Here are some of the changes she helped us with:

n The front page and the fronts of our sports, features and other sections will have more teasers and more indexes to help readers find inside-page stories and columns, such as obituaries and business. Readers increasingly feel they have less time in their days to read. The least we can do is help them find their favorite parts of the newspaper quickly.

n The Kennebec Journal will emphasize its red-and-sand colors more prominently throughout the paper, especially on page A1. The Morning Sentinel will emphasize its traditional blue. We've been "branding" our newspapers with these colors for years and wanted to use them even more.

n Starting Sunday, our features section changes from "Life & Leisure" to "Real Life." We started tinkering with story selection in our features section months ago.

We have been publishing more stories that working parents, single people and teen-agers might want to read. Articles about central Maine's dating scene, for example, and how important it is to find a good day care. This section change cements our desire to reach out to teens, young adults, families and older readers alike.

It is important, when design improvements are made, to point out what didn't change today:

n The size of type used in the text of our articles did not change. Nothing got smaller -- not the headlines, the type in our articles or event listings, nor the size of the newspaper.

n In fact, we are using the same "fonts," the same type faces, that we always have. We're using them differently but our headline, story and photo-caption fonts are unchanged. The type face in our Scoreboard and other listings pages hasn't changed, either.

Most important, our commitment to urgent, community journalism remains. In fact, it's our greatest strength.

Our 58 newsroom journalists cover more than 50 municipalities and 28 school districts across three counties in central Maine, and we cover them pretty thoroughly. That's the kind of newspapers we are and the kind we will remain.

Our aim with these visual changes is to help you get more enjoyment and information out of reading the Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. Give it a few days, and let me know how we did.

Eric Conrad is executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He can be reached at econrad@centralmaine.com.