You may have noticed some big changes in the look of the Times papers over the past two weeks as we have updated our front-page mastheads and gone to an advertising stack inside that is fully modular, giving the paper a cleaner design.

The new look has been months in the making, requiring coordination with the advertising, marketing and information technology departments at The Day to make it happen seamlessly.

I’d like to take a moment to thank our wonderful art director Maria Reagan for creating the new mastheads, based on a design first implemented in The Norwich Times. Thanks also go to newsroom production manager Scott Ritter for coordinating the cleaner look and helping to shepherd through the first edition along with assistant editor Owen Poole while I was away on vacation.

The modular design standardizes advertising sizes, giving us consistent looking pages that are easier to lay out. The front page is more open, allowing for larger photographs and a wider variety of layouts.

We hope you like the new look as well as the content we try to provide every week. But we are always looking to improve, so let us know when we miss something.

And feel free to contribute! We are always looking for great stories, photos, columns and human interest pieces. Send your thoughts directly to me at l.howard@theday.com, and let’s start a conversation. To contribute, email photos and written pieces to times@theday.com.

Lee Howard is The Day’s community editor.