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Did you pick up this week's paper? Did you feel refreshed and a wee bit giddy after flipping through it?

We thought you might. That's because of two things: the Mercury now comes out on Wednesday, and our editorial pages got a redesign. Other than that the paper is pretty much full of the same old delicious shit you love, and if you don't care about designery redesign stuff, stop reading now.

If you do care even the tiniest little bit, read more after the jump.

You might be wondering why we redesigned? Well, The editorial pages were originally designed for reading in dark 1990's grunge bars and we've been using the same template for the past 12 years. It's a handy template and has trusty fonts that punch the eye like a champ (our old headline fonts went by the name of Champion).

But as useful as the Mercury's template has been, it's also been a little useless. Ever try to find a section or column in the paper and just end up fruitlessly flipping pages in both directions? Well, now we have a navigation bar at the top of every page, so you'll know where to find what you're looking for.
Another thing we fixed was our info boxes. As square boxes they've bullied the flow and spacing of stories around for years. Now the info boxes are round and the stories flow around them like melted velvet tiger jizz.

You'll also notice our columnists have been rendered in monumental illustrations by Ryan Alexander-Tanner. Why did we do this? Sarah Mirk thought it would be a good idea. So if you don't like it, talk to her.

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There's a bunch of other tiny things that got a facelift too, but it's boring and I don't want to talk about it.

Here are a couple sample pages for those of you who can't afford to pick up a free hard copy of the paper:

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Now it's your turn to do something nice for us.