Letter from the editor: Changing a couple of our "regular" elements

First up, I’d like to thank a couple of PR executives who have brightened up our bank holiday in the office. I know that it is part of their job to be nice to us journos, but it is amazing how often the faux pleasantries fail to be combined with any sense of how our paper works on a daily basis.

Step forward charming Jane Read of Mr Filbert’s Inventive Snacks, which we can confirm are both inventive and delicious — especially the Kasbah-spiced almonds. Then there’s Matt Janes of the dating site I did not mention in a recent column on dating sites: doingsomething.co.uk whose strapline “dating’s more fun when you’re doing something” is self-explanatory. They both prove a little charm, wit and self-deprecation rarely go amiss.

Oh, and cupcakes. It was all a welcome distraction, and especially so for those of us who had to sit through an afternoon and evening with lots of miserable Tottenham and Arsenal fans (see Sport). While they moped, the rest of us beavered away, redesigning the back half of i, and changing a couple of our other “regular” elements.

Yet again, we have you to thank partly for this. Reader feedback is vital to i’s personality. We had a sense that i was evolving into two newspapers, with a serious, restrained front half and a back half of features and arts that in both content and design looked a little too tabloid. So, we put our Geordie art director, Nick (another Geordie!), to work on taking down the colour palette, and introducing a little more restraint, whilst both the features and arts editors got involved too.

There will be another daily arts feature every day and more highbrow content to balance out the popular culture. Look out for more serious features too. Towards the front there is a new daily obituary and other tweaks. More changes next week. We know you will let us know what you think.