This week’s Sunday Times looks more attractive than last week’s with the sparkle of the best of the web pages, but that is not the central point of the redesign. A superficial change of look is not what design is all about.

Newspaper design is not about cosmetics; it is about enhancing communication.

It is the news pages that test design. Many are the occasions when a design that “looks good” has proved incapable of coping with the exigencies of news – with a multiplicity of unpredictables in word and image requiring an immediate multiplicity of design responses but within a coding system the reader of values can understand. The signals of the value judgments are typographic (bigger story, larger headline!) but typography is only part of it. We can adapt the words of Walter Gropius that “whereas building is merely a matter of methods and materials, architecture implies the mastery of space”. Today’s Sunday Times exploits space and technologies that were not available in my own days as editor of the paper.

We did not have colour in the newspaper at all, and only with the transition to ownership by News International was liberating access to the computer finally achieved: for five years under the enterprising ownership of Lord Thomson of Fleet, banks of computers lay shrouded in dust sheets while union demarcation disputes dragged on about who should have the right to touch a keyboard.

Today’s editors have made skilful use of their armoury to guide – and seduce – the casual reader into discovering the good things in the text. The panels and sidebars with illustration are appealing.

The ability to devote separate sections to News, Sport, World, Money, Comment, Focus, is enviable; in my own time, when we had 12 pages of excellent reporting on the six-day war, I was advised that the need to pay the print unions extra would make a separately folded news section uneconomic. Similarly, plans for a separate book review were frustrated.

In the volatile, competitive business of newspapers, The Sunday Times has long been notable for risking innovation, always aware that readers initially tend to resent any change at all. It seems tame now but The Sunday Times, starting in September 1958, was the first in Britain to divide the content into two separately folded sections, creating the Review section featuring immensely popular series, then into three with the business news in September 1964. The invention of a separate rotogravure colour magazine in February 1962 was an idea Roy Thomson imported from the United States.

You’d have thought he’d sacked Westminster Abbey, such was the fury and contempt for colour that might somehow inflame the masses. It was 12 months before it was voted a huge success – by the readers and advertisers (due to editors Mark Boxer, Godfrey Smith and its design guru Michael Rand). It was Smith’s idea to produce another innovation, the part-work series which could be collated, at the end, in a special binder: A Thousand Makers of the 20th Century remains a landmark.

Of course the much-abused colour “supplement” was soon copied. In my time, imitation was the reward for our taking the risk to challenge the absurd programme information monopoly of the BBC’s Radio Times and ITV’s TV Times. The compilation by Elkan Allen was vividly expressed by Edwin Taylor’s design of laying two broadsheet pages on their side to achieve a striking horizontal display.

In 1971, we introduced the original concept of a News Digest. That was not the commonplace series of references to other pages, but a complete self-contained digest of the main spot news of the day. Previously the spot news of the day had been dropped at random in the paper; in Taylor’s redesign of the front page, with a wider measure for easier reading, the News Digest was anchored in the most accessible place in the paper, column one.

But perhaps the most enduring innovation was the creation of news graphics by the late Peter Sullivan. That, too, is part of a Sunday Times tradition. In 1843, soon after its founding in 1822, it was among the first in the world to use woodcuts for illustration.

Sir Harold Evans was editor of The Sunday Times from 1967-81