The new-look print edition: A newspaper and a viewspaper

Today the Independent has launched a new-look print edition.

Print readers will notice changes to our typography, and the design of the front page, but it is inside the paper where the major difference is to be found.

Starting today, we are introducing a unique second section, Viewspaper, a daily magazine supplement which includes Britain's most wide-ranging opinion, award-winning commentary, more space for your letters, the finest writing on cultural matters, a daily essay and in-depth features on the environment, media, science, technology and history. Today's Viewspaper features Hamish McRae on what the volcanic eruption in Iceland tells us about the way we live our lives, while Dominic Lawson discusses the moral ambiguity in our treatment of the Pope and Roman Polanski.

The Viewspaper is also where you'll find many of our regulars, like arts reviews, TV schedules, obituaries, and the As If cartoon strip, plus some new features such as our round-up of the best of the web, and aperçus from the pen of Charles Nevin. As a result, some fixtures have moved to the main section of the paper. Weather, crosswords, Sudoku and a daily picture quiz are to be found in the new Living section, which comes between Business and Sport. Today, Living focuses on health: other topics it will cover include fashion, food, families and homes & design. There will be a host of improvements throughout the paper, but we'll let you discover those at your leisure.

For those of you who take an interest in these things, the design work has been led by Cases & Associates of Barcelona, and the headline fonts are Sun (in the main section) and Farnham and Clan (in Viewspaper).

We hope you like how the new Independent looks. But we would most like to be judged by the quality of our content. We make no apologies for erring on the side of seriousness; these are serious times and we believe that what is most needed on the media landscape is a newspaper that is truly free of proprietorial influence and political affiliation (something no other paper can claim) to make some sense of the world around us.

You may not always agree with what we say, but it is spoken from the heart, and from a standpoint that's untainted by commercial or political imperatives. We have never been fearful of taking an unpopular stand, nor of highlighting issues that others might think unfashionable. We shall continue to do that. And as the election approaches, the need for a truly independent voice is greater than ever.

In the end, however, it's you, the reader, who will judge us. We take your views very seriously (hence an expanded letters section) and look forward to hearing your opinions on the new Independent. In the meantime, we hope we can count on your vote.

Email letters@independent.co.uk with your comments on the new-look Independent