You noticed.

After trying out new design in the features sections, The Salt Lake Tribune rolled out its new look in the A and Utah sections on Tuesday. And, with those new looks, we also changed the weather page. You really noticed that:

"Is the Tribune really trying to improve? I wonder. The new design of the weather section is very poor and difficult to read. Why mess with a good thing? It was great to take a quick glance and know what the weather will be for the week. It was nice clear and concise."

Or:

"First let me say the old [weather] formatting was very clear and 'worked' for me, but the new page is a disaster for a person with red/green color blindness. I'll be more specific about areas of the page. U.S. Map: As I have impaired color-cone receptors, I have trouble distinguishing brown from green, so for me, the entire southern half of the U.S. is a muddy mess today. In the color bar, I see the 'same' color for 110s and 70s, for 100s and 60s, etc. The new sunny and partly cloudy icons are good, however.

"Moon phases: Once again, murky to my eye. More realistic detail perhaps, but it's much easier to 'read' the old icons with just two distinct colors used for the four phases."

And then:

"The new weather page is terrible. It's suffering from a number of poor choices in colors and font sizes. …The sky is green? I can see that today and Wednesday are going to be hazy, that's well represented with that grayish-brown, but then the sky turns green?"

As you have seen so far this week, the Weather page is evolving. We change a bit every day to make the graphics more easily understood. We have made the typeface on the cities larger (although for some reason some cities were smaller in the Thursday edition). We will get there.

Now let's talk about the actual redesign of the A and Utah sections. I know it may rattle your senses if you are longtime readers of The Tribune, but I guarantee if you give it a few weeks, you will get used to it. Newspapers across the country have gone through these kinds of pains when they dragged their design from the 19th century to the 20th and now from the 20th to the 21st Century.

"The changing look of The Tribune is more evolution than revolution," said Deputy Editor Tim Fitzpatrick. "In recent years we have steadily increased the number of fact boxes and asides because they an effective way to increase the readership of stories. We also have been adding more graphic elements to appeal to readers more attuned to the visual presentation of information. The most recent changes are just the latest development in that progression."

At this point, nine out of 10 readers I have heard from like the new design. Again, we had some problems. There were a number of stories early in the week that were missing the last lines. We believe we have solved that problem. I spent time on Tuesday reading the last lines of stories to subscribers who do not have computers.

One reader noted:

"I know that looking over every story is a big job, but it should be someone's job. Today I was reading the Opinion section and Friedman's editorial got right to the summary and… I had to go online to finish the story because I just wanted to know how he was going to sum it all up as it wasn't in the 'print.'

"I'm not going to go stomping off and cancel my subscription even if you fail to print the last sentence of every story. Well, maybe I would."

We also experienced some rather strange hyphenation earlier this week: In one story, the computer actually hyphenated the name "Jeffs" at the end of a line to "Jef-fs."

We know this is annoying, but changing to a new computer system -- and a new design -- should make the paper better and easier to use in the long run.

The Reader Advocate's phone number is (801) 257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. E-mail: reader.advocate@sltrib.com.