Update:

11 Comments

I'm in Syracuse assisting with the judging of the Society for News Design’s Best of Newspaper Design competition through Monday. There’s comprehensive live blog coverage, as well as Twittering and Flickring.

4 Comments

The Chicago Tribune launched its long-awaited redesign today. A bunch more pages after the jump.

The SND site has a look into the project in slideshow and video form, and Poynter has a Q&A with Design Director Jonathon Berlin.

There’s Chicago reaction to the redesign from design consultant Ron Reason, and public radio station WBEZ talked with Northwestern’s Jeremy Gilbert and E&P’s Mark Fitzgerald. Chicago blogs Chicagoist and Gapers Block solicited comments from their readers.

And Visual Editors’ Robb Montgomery took his camera out on the streets of suburban Chicago to find out what readers think.

In other redesign news, Mario Garcia redesigned The Oklahoman and the Hartford Courant relaunched with a new design yesterday.

Continue reading "Chicago Tribune Redesign"

19 Comments

Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday night. Here’s how it played on America’s front pages on Friday morning.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel launched its redesign today. Charles Apple’s got every detail you’ll ever want to know.

And over at SportsJournalists.com, everyone’s got an opinion.

1 Comments

The Orlando Sentinel debuted its redesign this morning. Charles Apple’s got images and thoughts.

The Wall Street Journal weighs in with a piece in Monday’s edition. (Tip: if you’re not a WSJ subscriber, go through Digg).

Past experience shows newspaper makeovers don’t necessarily translate into financial success. After the Bakersfield Californian underwent a drastic redesign two years ago, the 60,000-circulation paper in California’s Central Valley saw a small initial jolt to circulation and revenue, sparked by the brighter look and expanded coverage of hot topics like immigration. But the gains have been erased as the area economy struggles. Bakersfield Californian Chief Executive Richard Beene says the steps were necessary to keep the paper relevant, but he has advice for others considering a similar redesign: “Don’t expect it to turn around circulation or revenue overnight. It’s not a magic bullet.”

Consultant Alan Jacobson launched a broadside against the redesign Friday, saying it needed to “concentrate on content rather than cosmetics.”

In these troubled times for newspapers, it’s important to note that “readership” and “revenue” are conspicuous by their absence from virtually all the words that have been published about Orlando’s redesign. Instead, much has been made of the cosmetic changes to come.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a redesign if somebody didn’t compare it to USA Today.

Update: And Mario Garcia writes about the black reverse nameplate.

3 Comments

The Chicago Tribune will launch a redesign in mid-September, Editor Ann Marie Lipinski told the staff today.

"We are committed to determining the basic architecture and sectioning of the paper within 30 days; deciding on paging (how many and where) within 45 days; understanding our staffing levels throughout the paper in 60 days; and being ready to launch a rethought and redesigned Tribune within 90 days in mid-September."

Romenesko’s got the full memo.

1 Comments

Charles Apple has the definitive post on the upcoming Orlando redesign, including a Q&A with Bo Burton, images, the works. So go there.

1 Comments

The schedule for SND Vegas has been posted. Check it out.

Newspaper design legend Mario Garcia has entered the world of blog. It’s “about storytelling, design, the projects we work on, the things we learn along the way.”

2 Comments

OK, here’s a passel of additional before-and-after Orlando prototype pages for the upcoming redesign, again thanks to Bo Burton. More pages after the jump.

Continue reading "More Ado About Orlando"

7 Comments

If Saul Bass did the Star Wars titles:

(via Calacanis)

5 Comments

Saturday was the Albuquerque Tribune’s last day. E.W. Scripps Co. determined the market could no longer support an afternoon paper and couldn’t find a buyer. The paper’s circulation in January had dwindled to 9,600 from 42,000 in the late ’80s.

The Trib long had a fine reputation as a visual paper. Here’s a slideshow with photos and words from Tribune photographers and editors. Go poke around the Trib’s site and read the remembrances, some of which I’ve linked below.

Incidentally, the guy at right in the 1994 page above is Tribune Managing Editor Neal Pattison, now executive editor at The Herald in Everett, Wash., and a former president of the Society for News Design. (And, full disclosure, the guy on the left is Tribune City Editor Michael Arrieta-Walden, who is now my boss.)

» Mike Davis: We set out to challenge readers and ourselves with the best pictures possible [Albuquerque Tribune]

» Mark Holm: Our photos hold up a mirror to the world and share the responsibility of reporting the news [Albuquerque Tribune]

» Eileen Welsome, Albuquerque Tribune made history with ‘The Plutonium Experiment’ [Albuquerque Tribune]

» Neal Pattison: Take a piece of my heart [Everett Herald]

4 Comments

SND29: The 2007 World's Best-Designed Newspapers from Society for News Design on Vimeo.

The Society for News Design has announced the “World’s Best-Designed Newspapers.” They are:

• Akzia in Moscow, daily, circulation 200,000
• Expresso in Paco de Arcos, Portugal, daily, circulation 140,000
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Frankfurt, Germany, weekly, circulation 320,000
• The Guardian in London, daily, circulation 355,750.

More details, videos, etc., here.

Also, the full database of all SND winners is now online. Update: Well, I guess it's not anymore. Tomorrow, they say. Update2: It's up now!

6 Comments

io9 has a roundup of sci-fi newspapers, including the one above from “Ultraviolet” about a Vampire Epidemic!!! Too bad most Hollywood movies can’t get their prop newspapers even close to looking right.

4 Comments

The Chicago Tribune, following the industry trend, debuts a narrower page Monday. They're taking the opportunity to make a few design changes, not the least of which is to change the Page One nameplate. It's been reversed out of a blue field for the last 25 years, but no longer. Joe Knowles, the Trib's AME for design and graphics tells the SND Update blog that "it had become overpowering in a way. It was a difficult visual element to overcome on the page. The new one lets the content come forward." The nameplate was redrawn by Jim Parkinson.

They're also making some typographic tweaks and some other minor changes. Details here.

>Goodbye blue at the Chicago Tribune [SND Update]

6 Comments

Here are the top U.S. front pages today in the wake of yesterday's New Hampshire primary.

Given that the No. 2 most overused word of last night's coverage was "comeback," I did NOT just see five major newspapers use "Comeback Kids" as a headline!

2 Comments

Newspapers & Technology reports that The Miami Herald is planning to outsource "some of its copy editing and page layout design work to Mindworks, a prepress production firm based in New Delhi, India." The company will oversee a weekly section of Broward County community news and other specialty advertising sections.

Wow. First I've heard of actual editorial design work being outsourced.

Update: I had previously linked to E&P, but it appears the report initiated with News & Tech, so I've changed the link. Thanks, Chuck!

Update 2:Robb points out this was an AP story on Dec. 27, noted, with the Herald memo, on Visual Editors. Hmm, trying to drop the bad news turd unnoticed in the middle of a holiday week. Where would a newspaper editor learn such a thing?

5 Comments

I’ve collected some front pages on the Benazir Bhutto assassination, in international and U.S. flavors.

4 Comments

Word came yesterday that Michael Whitley has been named Assistant Managing Editor for Design at the L.A. Times. Here’s a look back at the work Michael and his staff did during the fires in October.

When’s the last time your front page nabbed a thief?

2 Comments

The Washington Post debuted a new Style & Arts section on Aug. 26. It’s a merger of two regular Sunday sections.

Deputy Assistant Managing Editor for News Art Denny Brack and Style Design Director Martha Wright created the new design. Martha says:

Changes include enhanced Web keys, better use of color positions, more air on inside pages and the front, and frameless photos. Content is organized under Sounds (music), Stages (theater and dance), Screens (movies, TV, Internet) and Sights (the visual Arts). We've added Robin Givhan as a Sunday columnist, and created a Conversations page, anchored by a regular Q&A. There's also a Studio page, where local artists can explain their pieces in their own words. We'll have a doubletruck each week to showcase the work of staff photographers or take a closer look at other topics that demand that size and scope (normally it'd stand alone — happened to be a jump for our debut issue).

More pages after the jump:

Continue reading "Merging Style and Arts at the Post"

6 Comments

If you haven't seen it, you must watch this demo by Microsoft researcher Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Seadragon and Photosynth from the TED conference. Mindblowing.

10 Comments

Khoi Vinh, design director of nytimes.com (and SND Boston speaker) has a brilliant post that distills a lot of the thoughts about print designers and the web that have been banging around my skull for months. It's a must-read.

The prerequisite for doing something meaningful with any of these skills — HTML, CSS, Flash or whatever — is first embracing the medium as something different from print. Indeed, there's no point in learning these skills unless as a print designer you've made a prior shift in your understanding of how design works in digital media. Specifically, come to grips with the fact that, on the Web, design is not a method for implementing narrative, as it is in print, but rather it's a method for making behaviors possible.

More often than not, the reflexive approach that I've seen print designers take on the Web is to treat it as a vehicle for print-based design practices: fixing type sizes, specifying typefaces, ignoring usability and expediency, and perhaps most notoriously making the assumption that, over time, users will come around to a print-focused way of consuming content.

In my experience, none of those tactics work. Their all-around ill-suitedness tends to boil over to frustration when print designers realize that, by and large, there's little room for visual virtuosity online. Which is to say, the Web is not commonly an effective tool for highly expressive displays of typographic, photographic or illustrative skill. Looking for opportunities to execute the sort of improvisational and dramatic creative visions that we see in printed periodicals, for instance, is likely to be an exercise in disappointment.

I suspect this may be a bit of a preview of his SND Boston session "Print Vs. Online Design: Can a print designer find happiness online? Can a web designer learn from print?"

>This Way to the Web, Print Designers! [Subtraction.com]

36 Comments

You got the mutha-kernin’ skillz, yo?

(Thanks, Greg!)

20 Comments

The Associated Press noted over the weekend that New Zealand newspaper publisher APN News & Media has started outsourcing copy editing and layout work at some of its newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald, the country’s largest daily.

Starting Sunday, 20 full-time sub-editors at contractor Pagemasters New Zealand will be “operating on an extension of APN’s ‘Cyber’ computer editorial production system” at a site 20 minutes from the paper’s editorial offices, [APN deputy chief executive Rick] Neville said.

By the end of 2007, Pagemasters will have about 45 editing staff at their site to edit the seven newspapers — nearly 30 fewer than the newspapers employed for the job.

To be fair, this doesn’t really look like a “copy editing/design sweatshop a continent away” type situation. Pagemasters New Zealand is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Australian Associated Press, and they put together TV listings, comics pages and feature packages, among other things. Not all that different from some of the services syndicates or newspaper chains offer in the U.S.

Still, this is an order of magnitude different than contracting out the TV book or using the occasional wire-service-provided layout. And hardly seems likely to improve more than the short-term bottom line.

“I’m confident readers won’t notice the difference,” said Neville, who has led the project.

Well, no, maybe they won’t. But is that really what we’re looking for in newspapers today? For our ever-dwindling number of readers to not notice what we’re doing? Seems to me that’s precisely what we want to avoid.

15 Comments

The New York Times looks a bit more svelte today, rolling out its new 12" width, a 1½-inch reduction in width that brings the Times in line with most American broadsheets.

If you don't happen to have copies of the last two days' Timeses to compare, here's a goofy little animated GIF I cooked up that may give you some idea.

15 Comments

Here are the front pages of the two Twin Cities papers today.

Good, prominent reefers to online coverage in the Strib and Pioneer Press. Even though that's sort of a sad admission that "yeah, this information you're reading is out of date." I like how the Strib sends you to a dedicated bridge coverage page that's got everything in one spot (and, interestingly, no ads).

Also, front pages from the Top 50 circ US dailies are here.

19 Comments

Looks like ads may be coming to the front page of the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Observed says. In a memo to the staff, publisher David Hiller said the paper had “one of the worst quarters ever experienced,” and that the newspaper faces more competition for advertisers and is looking at “expanding the types and positioning of advertising.”

Here’s what Hiller said about the ads:

There has been a lot of focus on such ads, and I know there a real mix of views and emotions on this subject, so let me tell you what I think of them:

• Front page ads will raise several million dollars in revenue, and make a meaningful contribution to improving current trends
• We will make sure the revenue is additive, and not just switched from other pages
• They will help pay for the content we create for readers, and for our investment in new growth opportunities
• They are common at reputable papers across the U.S. and Europe, including in the Wall Street Journal’s much admired re-design
• Space taken (1 ½” strip) and related design issues can be managed
• We will have standards to ensure the ads look good, not schlocky
• If we communicate well, reader reaction should be OK

Update: As Anonymous points out, the Chicago Tribune reports that it will likely follow suit and that Newsday is considering it as well.

24 Comments

Something to remember next time you're whining about the A/C in the office not keeping you quite cool enough: Richard Turley, art director of The Guardian's G2 magazine, has an excellent piece at Design Observer about putting together the section smack in the middle of the mud-filled Glastonbury rock festival last month.

It might have been repeatedly falling over in the mud. It might have been being lost and insignificant in the ocean of people of all ages, denominations, races, classes. It might very well have been the cider. Whatever or whenever it was, there was no other decision to be made. We were going off the grid. We were going off the grid in a big way.

Well, in truth, we were off the grid way before anyway. Designing 20-odd pages of a newspaper supplement from the middle of a field was already a challenge to technology, patience and the normal processes of producing G2. Usually, and quite rightly, newspaper design is bound by the conventions of its production and structure, by the fast turnaround of ideas that precludes against overtly expressive design, and by the formal traditions, craft and Victorian ideologies of the newspaper. News designers live very much on the grid, working from templates, tied by the rules of preassigned headline, text, caption sizes, precise spacing. It is an exacting, dictatorial, inherently rigid view of the world of design. The grid is the imperious king, with whom you do not mess.

>Richard Turley: Off the Grid [Design Observer]

(Thanks, Michael and Richard!)

18 Comments

Hope your V-D Day celebrations were full of joy and hope for humanity.

18 Comments

This is just the most awesomest thing ever. Scott Walker, an assistant managing editor at the Birmingham News, has hacked together an old newspaper box, a Mac Mini, and a flat screen monitor to create a digital newsstand that will grab pages from the internet and display them in the rack. Brilliant!

12 Comments

Here are some before-and-afters (afters on the right) of the Virginian-Pilot’s new design.

And here are some new inside pages:

Continue reading "Take Me to the Pilot"

30 Comments

The Star-Telegram of Fort Worth launched a redesign on Sunday. They’ve narrowed the web width and turned Page One into a billboard for the rest of the paper.

In the four-page reader’s guide (PDF), Executive Editor Jim Witt writes:

You also need us to respect your busy life. Our quick-read formats will help you zero in on the information important to you, to speed you on your way. We think they also bring a jolt of energy and innovation to the paper.

The typography is Capitolium, Freight Micro, Freight Sans and Utopia.

This seems to be, in some ways, and extension of the paper’s 2004 redesign when the Sunday and Monday front pages became more teaser-oriented.

You can see what readers are saying about the changes here.

Here are some pages from the Sunday and Monday papers:

15 Comments

L.A. Times Creative Director Joe Hutchinson will become the art director of Rolling Stone, L.A. Observed and the SND blog are reporting. The New York Post said last month that Hutchinson turned the job down, but he’s reported to have reconsidered in the face of news that the Times will cut its workforce by 5 percent (150 positions, 70 of those from the newsroom), mostly through buyouts.

7 Comments

Striking front page by the Virginian-Pilot today. And a gutsy editorial choice.

Also, Pilot editor Denis Finley defends the photo choice on the Tuesday front page.

Update: Pilot design team leader Paul Nelson on how the page came together.

27 Comments

I’ve collected some front pages of the Virginia Tech massacres. Here are some Virginia front pages, here are the top 50 U.S. papers and some international papers. Update: I've added The Collegiate Times (above), the student newspaper at Virginia Tech. (Thanks, Colin!)

52 Comments

I’m at the University of Missouri judging the College Newspaper Design contest with Scott Goldman of the Indianapolis Star (and SND prez) and Kristin Lenz of the Hartford Courant. Winners will be going up live soon here. So far, sex, caffeine and alcohol seem to be popular student newspaper topics. Who woulda thunk it?

13 Comments

The Chicago Sun-Times launched a redesigned, more locally focused paper today.

As evidenced by the emphasized "Chicago" in the flag, they're beefing up their local orientation and adding more features such as
"Chicagopedia," a dictionary of Chicago words; "This Much I Know" where "interesting people tell you their secrets to a good life;" and "24/7," a 24-hour crime and mayhem roundup. The Sun-Times has been struggling in the Chicago market. Sun-Times Media's revenue fell 8.6% last year compared with the Tribune's 1.3% drop.

As far as the design, it will "make it more accessible, more modern and more readable for you, the reader. Because it's all about you."

Here's a guide to the new features. (Same thing here in a one-page PDF.)

Sun-Times advertising/marketing columnist Lewis Lazare writes:

Unexpected and uniquely local news stories will get top priority in the refreshed newspaper, which some ads in the rebranding campaign will reference as reflecting the "real Chicago."

Reflecting the increasing importance of the Web as a news resource, many stories will encourage readers to jump to the Web for additional specific content that might be tightly focused on Chicago — such as highly localized neighborhood guides — or links to the Web's best content on a range of topics.

Former Sun-Timeser Robb Montgomery's got a podcast interview with Editor Michael Cooke and Kenney Marlatt at SND posts a link to a video by Publisher John Cruickshank.

Outside reaction is starting to come in. Alan Jacobson says it's "one of the best redesigns seen in years."

With all the vim and vigor of Bakersfield, KC and Norfolk, the redesigned Sun-Times is bound to get some eyeballs, making the Chicago Tribune or award-winning Mercury News look like your father's Oldsmobile.

But my old friend Steve Rhodes, a veteran Chicago media observer and proprieter of the excellent Beachwood Reporter, is less taken with it:

Ho-hum. While there are some decent elements, it still looks like a dowdy newspaper. And those full-length photos of columnists are nothing but a distraction. But the real problem is one that every redesign faces — that old lipstick on a pig thing. Unfortunately, nobody wants to improve the pig. It's not that hard to understand. Campbell's can change the label all they want, but if their soup still sucks, their soup still sucks. If the Sun-Times — or any paper — wants more readers, you have to make a better newspaper (website not only included, but emphasized). And making a better, must-read newspaper means quality journalism, not "Chicagopedia" entries that purport to explain what words such as "buddy" mean in to people who live here. Redesigns always work around the edges, and in areas like packaging health and shopping news, but never seem to spark better ways to actually report on the city — and that's the guts of any newspaper. Just once I'd like to see a redesign that also gamed out an investment and redeployment of reporters throughout the city, instructed reporters to always wonder during an interview why they're being lied to, and, say, mandated that each reporter file at least one Freedom of Information request a month. That would be a newspaper that would show readership gains.

Also, a couple weeks ago, Rhodes reported:

When asked why the paper didn't invest more in the paper's website, Editor-in-Chief Michael Cooke was heard to say that nobody believes what they read on the Internet.

Yeah, that's the spirit!

Here are more pages from today's paper:

14 Comments

Poynter introduced the major findings (video; text script here) of its latest EyeTrack study at ASNE last week, and it’s getting a lot of pixels, mostly because it suggests that people read more of a story online (77 percent) than in print (62 percent broadsheet, 57 percent tabloid).

Other interesting findings:

• Alternative story forms seem to result in greater comprehension and 15 percent more visual attention (30 percent in broadsheet) than traditional narrative forms.


• Large photos and headlines draw the eyes in print, but online, navigation bars, teasers and story lists get primary attention.


• Color photos and live, documentary news photos got more attention than staged photos.

Alan Jacobson, for his part, is unimpressed and says that if we want to boost readership, what we really need to is find out why people read what they choose to read and not simply how much of it they read.

Our research shows that content selection is the number one driver of readership, and that relevant content about pocketbook issues and health/personal safety trumps all other kinds of stories, regardless of form.

Eyetrack07 does not include any consideration or evaluation of these content-based issues. It's limited to what people look at rather than why they read.

The full report will be released in June.

One thing to note about their “people read more online” stats: The sites they studied, StarTribune.com and sptimes.com, tend not to split stories into many pages, unlike others. I gotta think that’s gonna have an effect.

By the way, kudos to Will Sullivan for illustrating his post mentioning EyeTrack with the perfect image.

12 Comments

The Society for News Design has got themselves one of them interweb-log deals. Many updates about society doings and other things of interest. So hop into one of those internet tubes and head over there.

>SND Update: The Blog [SND.org]

1 Comments

Mint, a new financial daily in India, launched in print and online today. Garcia Media did the design for both the print and online products. Mario Garcia writes about his approach to the design:

1. It should be colorful, like India itself.


2. Ideally it should be in a small format -- we did versions of broadsheet and Berliner, and opted for the smaller, easier to handle format.


3. It must have perfect fusion with the online product. And, in fact, I recommended from the start that this product should appear FIRST as an online newspaper, and then two weeks later on print. That is the way it will be. This newspaper is born as an online product.


4. There should be substance, but also quick reads.


5. Navigation should be paramount.

>Mint [Garcia Media]
>Have a (live) Mint [Garcia Media]

21 Comments

I’ve been negligent in linking to this, but be sure to check out Alan Jacobson’s excellent new(ish) Best Front Design feature. He looks at a selection of the day’s pages and analyzes why he thinks they work (or not!). And now that he’s got commenting enabled, it’s even excellent-er.

(This link has nothing to do with the fact that he picked my newspaper’s front page today. Really. I had nothing to do with the page anyway. Really!)

Update: Jacobson and Quark are going to award $1,000 in cash and more than $1,000 in Quark software to the designer of the best front page every month. January's winner is Robert Suhay of Norfolk's Virginian-Pilot.

>Best Front Design (Brass Tacks Design)

5 Comments

The new narrower, Mario Garcia-redesigned Wall Street Journal is out today. Free on the newsstands and online today, apparently. Romenesko’s got links. Here are some of today’s section fronts and a page about the new design from the reader’s guide. Here’s a PDF of that page.

Garcia says he was already getting positive reader e-mails before dawn. But for his part, web designer Greg Storey says “who in their infinite ivy-league 5th Avenue wisdom spilt McClatchy all over this morning’s Wall Street Journal?”

Update: Here's the full PDF of the Reader's Guide.

18 Comments

8 Comments

Also, I've been playing around with something as a daily feature. Here's a page with the Top 50 (or so) circulation U.S. front pages from today.

22 Comments

Oh, StarTribune.com! Why must you make my eyes bleed?

The Merc’s Michael Bazeley tells us why not only is this a visual disaster, but bad business as well.

Update: Boston.com did it today, as well, Heidi points out. Lovely.

>StarTribune goes over the top [Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley]

11 Comments

Adobe's says they're releasing the much rumored public beta of Photoshop CS3 today. Supposedly will be available at Adobe Labs "in the early hours Pacific Standard Time on December 15." It's a bit past that by my Pacific Standard Time clock and no sign of it yet.

Update: Looks like it's here (registration required).

3 Comments

Roger Black launched his new site today, including a weblog. Promises to be an interesting new space.

1 Comments

If your bad managing editor wouldn’t free up the funds for you to make it to SND Orlando and you’re in the upper Midwest or Northeast, design guru Ron Reason is offering a couple of day-long workshops this fall in Chicago (pdf flier) and New York (pdf flier). All for the low, low price of 95 bucks (Hurricanes not included. Probably.), all of which goes directly to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (for whom Ron is raising funds via training for the Chicago Marathon in October). What a deal!

Seattle Weekly says: "Do journalists in New York do any original thinking at all?"

Business Week says: "I ... was unaware of the Seattle Weekly headline, story or cover art."

Me, I just think it's funny (on several levels!) that on a cover about Bill Gates, Seattle Weekly used, not Microsoft's Comic Sans, but Apple's, er, homage to it.

11 Comments

Left: Page from 12 T y p o graphical Interpretations, Willi Kunz, 1975
Right: Poster for the Yale School of Architecture, Michael Bierut, 2005

Did I think of it consciously when I designed my poster? No, my excuse was the same as Kaavya Viswanathan’s: I saw something, stored it in my memory, forgot where it came from, and pulled it out later — much later — when I needed it. ...

I find all of this rather scary. I don’t claim to have a photographic memory, but my mind is stuffed full of graphic design, graphic design done by other people. How can I be sure that any idea that comes out of that same mind is absolutely my own? Writing in Slate, Joshua Foer reports that after Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism, she was virtually paralyzed. “I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own,” said Keller. “For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book.” The challenge is even more pronounced in design, where we manipulate more generalized visual forms rather than specific sequences of words.

>I am a Plagiarist [Design Observer]

30 Comments

Inspired by artist Laura Fields and critic John Berger, Mark Kingsley has a fascinating meditation (with many examples) over at Speak Up on the “collision” between advertising and news images. It’s a collision exemplified by Page A3 of The New York Times, where there’s usually a fairly in-depth international piece and a photograph. Combine that with the ubiquitous Tiffany’s ad in its traditional upper-right spot, and you get a juxtaposition that often creates an entirely new narrative about society, art, economics, politics and culture.

My early exposure to this “way of seeing” was first viewing the [“Ways of Seeing”] BBC series as a freshman in college, and then as a junior designer in New York. Even though they didn’t speak the language of intertextuality, the art directors above me often would tweak layouts whether one image was “looking” at an image across from it or not. And from that moment on, inspired, I began collecting magazine covers based on their overall narrative effect.

So ever since seeing Child’s Play, I’ve looked at page three of the New York Times differently: always looking for a correspondence between the narratives of news photo and Tiffany ad, a correspondence between text and image, or simply a correspondence of shapes.

>Laura Fields and the Page Three Sutra [Speak Up]

2 Comments

Stephen Komives, creator of the much-discussed "Enough Already" page, sends along a response:

I removed the Enough Already page yesterday from NPD. It seemed to have reached the end of its useful shelf life.

It wasn't a very good page, really. Lots of unnecessary white space, a big 'To Be' verb in the headline. Not good.

It's been an interesting week. The "handout" obviously touched a nerve. It's clear the design community is divided over the issue of knock-offs, and it's a topic worthy of further discussion, and maybe some guidance from organizations such as SND.

The stuff I wrote in the handout was way over the top. It was meant to be satirical and provocative. I doubt anyone would have taken notice if it hadn't been. I felt it important to call attention to this issue in a dramatic way.

If this leads to a little more soul-searching before we launch into another Wanted Poster motif, maybe that's good.

But to the good people at the Daily Breeze, who got their feelings hurt, I apologize. They've gone to lengths to explain themselves and haven't shied away from the dialogue, and they have my respect. If someone from their staff would like to attend the SND workshop here in August, I'll pay the registration fee. I mean that.

It's not for me to judge them or anyone.

I heard from a lot of people this week. Some trying to point out more egregious examples, others confessing to having knock-off skeletons in their own closets, others chastising me for adopting a holier-than-thou posture.

I'm not really sure how to respond to any of it. I would never claim to be a better designer or more original thinker than the rest of y'all. Or pretend to be a watchdog for the industry, either. We know in our hearts what's right and wrong and when we are crossing an ethical line. My only advice would be not to deny yourself the wonder of new discovery, whether through design or another medium.

Let me also apologize to Starbucks. They're one of the nation's top companies in terms of employee satisfaction, they provide health benefits to their part-time employees (impressive), they offer a wide variety of coffees. (After this week, I think I need to keep my options open: I might just be America's next barista.)

For now I have to get back to work. The dreaded hurricane-season preview guide is upon us, for the upteenth time. But now there's pressure. I'm thinking, crap, I better come up with something different. I have a feeling people will be watching.

- Stephen Komives

I'll echo Stephen and say that I'm glad that Daily Breeze staffers, specifically Toni Sciacqua, the Breeze's news and design editor, waded into the fray. Mad respect, yo.

And, for something completely different, comes this comment from "chou" on the post about the Daily Mail's Guardian ripoff:

Speaking as a UK national newspaper production journalist... ladies, gentlemen .. relax!
Over here we tend not to get too hot and steamed up because a competitor has nicked one of your ideas.. it's seen as a form of flattery. And every single paper on Fleet Street (the single most competitive newspaper market in the English speaking world) has done it. The Daily Mail is especially culpable - but they are probably more admired for not letting pride come before product. See a great idea, use it. I know the guys on the Guardian's G2 section had a good laugh about it the next morning and just saw it as confirmation that it was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed. In the United Kingdom, these examples of borrowing raise nothing but a chuckle .. certainly not angst-ridden handwringing and cries of woe about what the world has come to.

We try not to get our heads stuck that far up our arses. Or asses...

16 Comments

Stephen Komives, design editor at the Orlando Sentinel, came up with the above "page" (pdf here) after yet another instance of similar pages cropped up today:

Komives' advice (forgive me for copying his red type):

1. DON'T DO IT.
If you don't see the endless visual possibilities that design has to offer and take joy in the craft because of that aspect of it, you might be in the wrong field. Maybe try Starbucks?

2. DON'T DEFEND IT.
Please don’t encourage bad behavior. It feeds the cycle. We would never think to support artists or writers who graft work from others.

3. DON'T BET ON GETTING A JOB WITH IT.
A liar is caught faster than a one-legged man. We all see what everyone else is doing and where ideas originate. You can’t take someone else’s idea, especially a highly original one, and expect to successfully pass it off as your own.

4. WE'RE WATCHING YOU. REMEMBER THAT.

(Thanks, Michelle!)

Update: As regards the Daily Breeze page above, Jennifer Berta of the Daily Breeze said at Visual Editors:

We got permission from the Atlanta paper to pick up the package in its entirety but tweaked it for style and added some local numbers. They sent us the story and we found a similar graphic. We saw it and thought it was relevant information to what's going on in our communities with hundreds of workers and students marching into the 110 freeway and many more immigration stories to come.

39 Comments

Now that the "Hot L" treatment has made its way from Montreal, Baltimore and Bakersfield into the much-watched Virginian-Pilot, look for this kind of thing on a front page near you!

I think this is nicely done. As Alan pointed out to me, this is an interesting counterpoint to the plagiarism conversations. There's stealing, and then there's using ideas you find elsewhere, adapting them to serve your readers. Sometimes a thin line, perhaps?

34 Comments

That's quite a, um, coincidence there! And it's sparked a bit of conversation at Visual Editors.

>Such a thing as design plagiarism? [VisualEditors.com]

16 Comments

Remember that little problem Quark had with their new logo last fall? They've tried again. The internets are not impressed.

9 Comments

Hmmm, I've seen something like this before. Wish I could remember where ...

4 Comments

You see Quark's new logo? I'm betting the Scottish Arts Council has.

(via Coudal)

19 Comments

Jonathon Berlin, editor of the Society for News Design's quarterly Design magazine, sends along this remembrance of Peter Palazzo by Lou Silverstein set to appear in Design's next issue, hitting mailboxes in the next month or so. (It's the "How To Issue" with 13 tutorials on everything from how to use color, to how to write headlines for a tabloid, to how to write the Wall Street Journal's news summary, to how to make a wood-cut illustration. All copy machine friendly!)

A true classic

Peter Palazzo changed newspapers with his innovative designs

By Louis Silverstein
From SND Design Journal, No. 95, publishing summer 2005

Writing about Peter Palazzo comes easy to me. Our lives were intertwined sometimes tightly, sometimes more loosely, for over 50 years. We followed parallel career paths and we were good friends - a friendship that spread to include our families. Pete was my daughter's godfather, a fact that he made much of, introducing himself at times to mutual friends as "the Godfather." Pete is best remembered of course for his sensational work on the New York Herald Tribune, probably the most dramatically innovative body of graphic design that helped fuel the revolution in newspaper design of the 1960s and 1970s. The Trib had its own competitive marketing problems at the time, but it also embodied the powerful forces of change that affected the entire industry. These included: the advent of television competition; the early technological rumblings of photo composition and of the computer age; the post World War II expansion of markets into the suburbs with the growing role of women in our society and of sports and entertainment; and the decline of the mass circulation magazines like Life and Look.

Continue reading "Silverstein on Palazzo"

1 Comments

Design consultant Tony Sutton alerts me to a PDF he's created of an interview he did with legendary newspaper designer Peter Palazzo in 1995. While you're there, poke around a bit. A lot of interesting stuff there, including a typographic journey around Norwich, England with Nick Shinn and Sutton's address to the Scandinavian Society for News Design "Why Are Your Newspapers So Dull And Boring?"

7 Comments

Hey, fellow newspaperpersons! Let's give a Norwegian brother a hand. Erik Bolstad of the Norwegian Broadcast Corp. is doing some translation work and wants to know what you call those little words above the headline. In Norwegian it's a "stikktittel." Perhaps you call them "labels" or "overlines" or even "Harrowers" (after that design consultant that made you use them all the time). I usually call them "kickers," but I gotta say, "stikktittel" has a ring to it.

What do you call them? Put 'em in the comments.

18 Comments

Spanish heartthrob designer Rodrigo Sanchez of El Mundo's Metropoli gets pulses racing at VisualMente, a new Spanish-language design weblog by Dolores Pujol and Norberto Baruch B. Of last week's Clint Eastwood cover (with illustration by Ra�l Arias) they say:

Today, again, Rodrigo Sanchez demonstrates to us that all is not lost in the city of fury, with the new cover of Metropoli. When nobody seems to be able to awake from the eternal dream of daily mediocrity, our superhero appears and the visual battle is, again, won. At least, for one week. (Thanks, brother)

Also, he has a short essay on the site. Here's some of it (roughly):

Without a doubt the main thing at the time of creating a cover is the idea. The I-D-E-A. But the idea is not only the idea. The idea is also how to do something one way and not another or its opposite. The idea is a color, the idea is a structure of elements, a syntax of forms, letters and images. Here the idea is the form. ...

We must cause the reader to dedicate more than 4 seconds of contemplation of the cover. If it is necessary we give him 4 minutes. And, if it is possible, we give him a lifetime to think about it and try to find out what it is we tried to tell him. ...

By the way, the covers are thrown away the next day or wrap fish. The ideas remain beaten in the walls.

For more of Sanchez's work, go here and here.

>El paladín de la Justicia vuelve a volar sobre la Metropoli [VisualMente]
>El toro tuvo una idea [VisualMente]

Mediabistro has some new interviews with magazine design folks up, including Roger Black. He has interesting things to say about redesigns, reader ownership and newspapers throwing out history with their typefaces.

There is a certain kind of magazine that really owes it to itself to have some kind of continuity, and people forget that. I have said this a hundred times, it's not sinking in: The real owners of a magazine are its readers. If you are a subscriber to, say, Newsweek for 20 years, you really think of it as 'my Newsweek' and changes to the magazine are sometimes not very welcome. If only they would consult you—sometimes you've been there longer that any of the staff.

Newsweek is a good example. I did a redesign of Newsweek in 1985, and I did two or three others after that. In 1985, we tried to build on some core memory on what Newsweek should look like, which was a little rougher. I thought of it as a little tabloid, although I never said that to them. It should be more popular, more liberal, more fun, more unpredictable, you know… rougher. I think it came out very well, and, in any case, it coincided with the big shift between Newsweek and Time. So [then-editor] Maynard Parker had me redesign it again, in a serious way, and then he had problems with the art director, and I came back in and art directed the magazine as a consultant for a short time. When Maynard died, I didn't really have the heart to work on it anymore, it was too upsetting. Then my successor changed it dramatically and threw out the typeface that I originally put in, even though it had been there for years.

It's like when the Times of London threw out the typeface Times Roman. Now, maybe it was becoming generic—I mean, every printer in the world had their typeface on it—but, my God! It's called Times Roman for a reason! Make it work for you!

They could have taken their design and kept that equity. They've changed it since then, too. Why didn't they go back to Times Roman? It's the same thing if you're talking about American newspapers. The Boston Globe had a beautiful typeface called Madison that was originally their staple typeface, that [famed typographer] Matthew Carter had redrawn for them. Nobody else in the Unites States—or maybe in the world—used it. It was distinctive, very Boston for some reason, very apropos to the history of the Globe, to the whole thing. And then, for some reason, a new editor came in and cleared that out and put in Miller, which is a very fine typeface that Matthew Carter did, but sadly, it's used by everyone in the world. It's all over the place, particularly under the name Georgia. They took something out that was their own. I had the same problem with The New York Times throwing out Bookman and Trade Gothic.

They also have interviews with CITY creative director Fabrice Frere, Fortune design director Bob Newman, Travel + Leisure design director Emily Crawford and Fairchild group design director Edward Leida.

And on a related note, the good Mr. Black was kind enough to comment on last week's Examiner eagle post, clarifying a point about the provenance of said eagle, so don't miss that.

7 Comments

Belgium's De Morgen is understandably proud (in Flemish) of its design award. Yves Peters and commenters at Typographica have some thoughts, and David Earls at Typographer.org is unimpressed.

The front page appeared cluttered and comes complete with an unfortunate Guardian-esque masthead that has none of the finesse of its apparent progenitor. Throughout, the inconsistent use of type (Swift and ITC Conduit) is jarring, and this would seem entirely consistent and the inevitable consequence with the "organic" approach taken to the paper's design. Maybe I am behind the times, but I would have suspected that a newspaper needs a holistic approach to its design rather than a piecemeal one.

>De Morgen is uitgeroepen tot Europe's Best Designed Newspaper [De Morgen]
>De Morgen is Europe’s Best Designed Newspaper [Typographica]
>Typographer.org

9 Comments

The winners of the Sixth European Newspaper Award have been announced. And Europe's Best Designed Newspapers are:

Local newspaper: Diario de Noticias, Huarte-Pamplona, Spain, 17,000 circ.

Regional newspaper: Het Parool, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Nationwide newspaper: De Morgen, Brussels, Belgium, 60,000 circ.

Weekly newspapers: Bergens Tidende Søndag, Bergen, Norway, 90,000 circ.

Sentinel Sunday, Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, Great Britain, 13,100 circ.

Judges’ Special Recognition: Village, Dublin, Ireland, 20,000 circ.

Het Parool and De Morgen are Garcia Media clients. Mario Garcia reacts here. And the SND-E site has a feature here on the May redesign of Diario de Noticias.

Speaking of contests, the SND call for entries for the 26th "Best of Newspaper Design" competition is in the mail, and available at the SND site. Deadline's Jan. 19 for domestic entries, Jan. 26 for non-U.S. entries. Time to get friendly with your file cabinet (or that neat Mac folder of PDFs you've organized so well, right?).

>Sixth European Newspaper Award

4 Comments

Poynter's Anne Van Wagener says: "Think inside the box!"

Unlimited choices can lead to weak concepts, schizophrenic typography, and barriers to readability. Too many choices can also become overwhelming when starting a new project. ...

Take a close look at your limitations. Instead of seeing them as obstacles, discover how they can become assets that help you develop into a more effective communicator.

>In Praise of Limits [Poynter Online]

2 Comments

The New York Post reports today that the Manhattan DA is looking into the alleged siphoning of at least $500,000 over a 10 year period from the Society of Publication Designers.

Bride Whelan — who had run the organization for 22 years — was ousted over the summer amid claims of missing funds and "financial irregularities" leveled by the SPD board.

The SPD is led by its president, Fred Woodward, a legend in the art-director world whose day job is design director of GQ at Conde Nast.

The society apparently is facing a cash crunch that forced it to move out of its Times Square headquarters into smaller office space on less pricey Park Avenue South last week.

The news of financial irregularities at the Society was stunning to much of its membership, since the organization barely grossed $500,000 a year and Whelan herself said she made less than $50,000 a year. ...

Whelan, who only yesterday announced plans for a new design competition to rival one of the functions of the SPD, said she was surprised and shocked by the new allegations.

"I guess it must have made them a little crazy," she said of her new venture. She insisted she has done nothing wrong.

SPD, however, insisted that an investigation has been underway for months and that Whelan "was given numerous opportunities to explain these regularities. She chose not to."

>DA Eyes Design Group [New York Post, via Romenesko]

Scott Dadich, creative director of Texas Monthly magazine and a Democrat, writes in The New York Times that Bush is the front-runner in the logo race.

A typical Kerry logo displays the same inconsistency that his opponents accuse him of. A steady visual message requires the consistent use of the same font over and over again. On a typical drive to work, I encounter no fewer than five typefaces used in as many different Kerry-Edwards logos. One is stretched out; another is condensed. One looks masculine; one looks feminine. In contrast to Mr. Bush's aggressive sans-serif font, Senator John Kerry's multitudinous font choices center on the use of thin, delicate-looking, "girlie-man" type. No wonder some voters think he's a vacillating wimp.

*P.S.: The above graphic is by Paula Scher. Make sure you click on it to read the bigger version.

>What You See Is What You Get [The New York Times]

5 Comments

Newspapers & Technology notes that Quark is losing ground to InDesign.

Indeed, although Quark still retains the lion’s share of the market, some high-profile defections are beginning to alter the balance. Within the past few years, papers such as the (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot, the Boston Globe, the (Phoenix) Arizona Republic and the Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News have made the switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign. More recently, The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., said it would begin using InDesign as part of its deployment of Unisys’ Hermes-10 editorial app, in the process abandoning the Quark Publishing System, an editorial production suite of apps built upon QuarkXPress.

And The San Diego Union-Tribune (383,224; Sunday, 444,527) is the latest to leave Quark, putting into motion plans to migrate to InDesign over the next several months.

Ryan Webb, creative services director for the Washington (N.C.) Daily News, said he switched to InDesign because of more attractive pricing and support.

“Adobe not only offered more attractive upfront and ongoing pricing for software and support, but also provided a high level of consistency and integration across its applications not possible with proprietary software,” he said. The News began using InDesign in March 2003 after investigating the benefits of an all-Adobe workflow.

>Apps squaring off [Newspapers & Technology]

29 Comments

Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman has wise words about coming up with one design that's all that (and a bag of chips!), and one that serves the content best. And then making the right call.

If you’re halfway good at visual design, you get off on it. When it’s going well, it feels like you are creating a world. Often, looking back, you’ll realize that what felt like divine revelation was merely ordinary journeyman’s work. But sometimes, you surpass yourself. Sometimes, stumbling blindly with half a plan, you create Beauty. As the parent of that child, you feel love for what you have made. But that rare exceptionally new and unique design isn’t necessarily the best design for the job.

Design, whether it’s automotive design or web design, is about use. The car that handles the turns and gets the best mileage may be better designed than the chartreuse job with the big fins, even if they are the finest fins ever shaped out of metal.

>Production for use [Zeldman.com]

So SND and Poynter are starting an "an e-mail list server to discuss issues of news design." Now, I don't want to piss on their Wheaties, and I wish them the best of luck, but a list server? Isn't that a bit, um, 1993? Next, 28.8 baud modems! Why not just get behind a slick, well-organized message board that, in three months, has amassed more than 370 members and more than 1700 messages on 260+ topics? Where there are discussions about up-and-coming designers, portfolio critiques and where to buy geeked-out action figures for your desk? And where there's a burgeoning nightly chat scene?

They're ignoring the initiatives of people in the trenches, which just tends to confirm the suspicions that many have about Poynter's cluelessness about the Real World. It’s regular sport at the Testy Copy Editors board to mock the latest missives from the Poynter ivory tower. Ever seen any of the Poynter writers link to VisualEditors? This humble blog has gotten just one or two links buried in interminable lists of "resources." The link sidebar in the "Design Desk" column includes Ron Reason's musty site (updated: Sept 3, 2001), ACES and NPPA, but no VisualEditors, Newspagedesigner, Newsdesigner.com or any of the other designer-driven sites. This isn't sour grapes. I don't really care whether they link me or not. But it does make one wonder if they really have any real sense of what it's like outside that pretty building by the bay.

Update: The SND front page now has this line under the announcement of the e-mail list:

"If message boards are more your style of interaction, try visualeditors.com, run by SND pal Robb Montgomery."

There ya go!

>SND-Poynter News-Design List[SND]
>VisualEditors.com
>SND
>Poynter

18 Comments

The website is annoyingly designed (those tiny little scrolling windows! Why? WHY?) and, erm, pink (you didn't know that cosmopolitans were related to newspaper design, did you?), but the folks at the University of Missouri chapter of the Student Society for News Design are beginning to post the results of the College Newspaper Design contest. Looks like the kids at the Ball State Daily News cleaned up. Go look for your future interns.

Update: Well, revoke my alumni privileges and bar me from Shakespeare's forever! In the comments, Emmet Smith (Ball State grad) actually, you know, counted the awards instead of just eyeballing it and has informed me (Missouri grad) that there were "23 awards for Mizzou plus a third and honorable mention in the Designer of the year category to 19 awards and a 2nd in DOY for Ball State. Ball State did win for overall design with Mizzou a no-show and they swept 1-3 in page one design." Well! Score one for reporting! (I blame the pink background.) And go Tigers!

>College Newspaper Design contest [MU Student Society for News Design]
>Ball State Daily News PDF archive

13 Comments

Hey, biz designer buddies, tired of all the white guys in suits infesting your pages? The Fab Five too busy to clean out the squalid bathroom that is your business section? Bonita Burton, Business design director at the Merc, has got your back with 10 Tips for Better Business Page Design.

If you've ever worked the room at a party and avoided the intellectual in the corner who's completely out of place in a decades-old leisure suit, you can empathize with the experience many readers have flipping through the newspaper and encountering the business section.

The problem with allowing the geek in the glasses to remain a visual wallflower is that he actually is a great conversationalist with some really fascinating stuff to say. Business stories are rich with some of the most compelling life-and-death subject matter, exploring the intersection of power and money and what all of that means to John and Jane Doe.

But the visual storytelling in most business sections still does not reflect this energy or excitement. Their image doesn't begin to project their personality. And while everyone else at the party has gone through make-over after make-over in efforts to attract readers, business is still sporting that look that says he's playing hard to get and isn't that much fun to spend time with anyway.

>10 Tips for Better Business Page Design [BusinessJournalism.org]

On this High Holy Day in Christen- and Golf-dom, spare a moment to remember the Ones who carry us through the rough patches. Who soothe our souls when the proofs are late. Who becalm our jittery, latte-deprived spirits when the ideas won't flow. Who rescue us with multiple undo's when we have used the Magic Wand in an unnatural fashion. No, I do not speak of the Assistant Managing Editor for Visuals, for she is part of the Problem. I speak of the Six Patron Saints of Graphic Design. They are, if you have forgotten your Design Catechism: St. Anxieté, St. Concepta, St. Exacto, St. Pantone, St. Pixela and St. Typo.

Perhaps the our most neglected saint of late is St. Pixela, Patron of Retouching and Comfy Chairs:

Isabel de Santa Maria y del Madonna de Guadalupe, who preferred to be addressed by her confirmation name of Pixela, was a Moorish princess. Her father, King Wacom, persecuted artists and kept them prisoner in his castle where they worked tirelessly, day and night, in a cold room with no lights or windows. Pixela secretly visited the prisoners, bringing them food and venti cappuccinos. Upon befriending one prisoner in particular, the Bishop of Photoshop, she discovered a calling for recreating his paintings at a larger size after he'd finished painting them. She lived as a solitary by the Lake of Saint Vector, died at the age of 100, and is still revered worldwide.

Now go forth and clone no more!

>The Patron Saints of Graphic Design [W. Lynn Garrett, via Creative Generalist]

From the referrer logs today comes news that Robb Montgomery, deputy news editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, has set up a "visual editors discussion board."

This forum is designed to give a voice to the community of journalists who edit, design, layout, photograph, picture edit, produce graphics, create illustrations or work with people who do this type of work at newspapers, magazines and Web sites.

There are many organizations that support, train and reward these journalists, but until now there hasn't been a common exchange for members to discuss the state of the art.

We hope this humble board will serve you in your career — please pipe in with your thoughts, comments and suggestions.

The discussions are starting. Go thou and do likewise!

>Visual editors discussion board

3 Comments

Spare a good thought tomorrow for the poor FedEx and UPS people of Syracuse, N.Y., upon whom the nation's newspaper designers, being creatures of the deadline, will dump thousands of SND entries. Also, the forecast for Syracuse is snowy, windy and 14 degrees. Ouch! Those little brown UPS shorts are right out!

8 Comments

"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer - that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, in a New York Times Magazine story on the iPod

>The Guts of a New Machine [The New York Times Magazine]

1 Comments

Over at News Page Designer, B. Barker at the Charleston Daily Mail posted an A1 with a dogleg lead and sparked an interesting little discussion about doglegs and modular design.

Paul Wallen, ME/Visuals of the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal, takes up the classic vertical standard:

I feel that modular design is actually a bit limiting and, frankly, very overrated. I have come to prefer vertical design for for the flexibility it offers to react to the news, the activity it creates on a page and the clarity it provides in establishing dominance. I've found that while newsroom folks often react violently to "doglegs," readers are rarely confused by them if done well.

And in this corner, wearing the sturdy modular trunks, Paul Morgan of the Seattle Times says:

While designers need to bring people into the paper, I think we might push "overselling" a story just for the sake of impact. We can't forget we're newspeople first, designers second. But going to a dogleg front ... just to get a real CP or a real lead is sacrificing news judgment for design. Plus, I just think doglegs are confusing. We must never forget the importance of clarity and simplicity in design, and that means every piece in its own space.

I'd say either approach can work, but I think you should pick a side of the fence and stay there. I don't see a point in busting out the dogleg once every six months. Sure, your readers will figure it out. But if you've spent every day for the last six months leading them to believe that you do things a certain way, what's the use in suddenly jerking the chain?

>Dogleg discussion [News Page Designer, registration required]

4 Comments

Poynter's Design Desk asks "Are you a designer or a decorator?"

A decorator will employ some of the following techniques:

• Using clip art or any image just to fill space.

If it doesn't help readers by giving them more information, then it's decoration. A designer looks for information in the story that can be used in a box or sidebar or that can be developed into a meaningful concept. If it isn't there, ask where you can find it.

Whaaat? You mean that reindeer border tape we used in college (in process red!) wasn't "meaningful?"

Also:

Type is a vitally important part of design. But when designers are given the restriction of using one or two typefaces, they become free to explore the content and get to the essence of the story. Re-focus that energy on better headlines and better communication with readers. Creativity is born of restriction.

Word.

>Decorator or designer? [Poynter]

2 Comments

The Dallas Morning News launched a free five-day-a-week tab today, called Quick, in response to the AM Journal Express, which is set to launch Wednesday. You can download a PDF of the whole 32-page thing here, or browse through it page by gripping page here. Is it just me, or does Dallas seem like a strange place for these things to sprout? I think of high-density, public-transit-heavy markets. All I know of Dallas comes from layovers at DFW and '70s television, but I think of sprawl, air-conditioned Cadillacs (with steer horns, of course) and pickups with "Don't Mess with Texas" stickers, not high-rise apartments, trains and thousands of commuters walking the streets. Front Burner, the weblog of D Magazine, says Quick went from concept to publication in 10 days. That's, well, quick! So, with such a short lead time, you think they hired any actual staff for it or are they just jacking up the workload on the main daily's staff? I know what my guess is. Think they'll hire any in the future? The job boards are tellingly silent.

>Quick [Dallas Morning News]
>Hot, Juicy, Media Gossip, aka Breaking News [Front Burner, via 601am]

3 Comments

Most of you probably saw this piece by some alt-weekly guy who dislikes subheads. So he wrote a column. (I guess after two whole months on the job, he's already run out of things to say about "life, me, you, the cities, the world, art--and yes, music.") But since it's an alt-weekly, it needed, y'know, irony! So he put subheads before every graf! (It's gold, Jerry! Comedy gold!) But I shouldn't make fun. He's not entirely wrong. Subheads can screw up a story's narrative. In fact, so can paragraph breaks! So let's dump 'em!

Commence Skimming Start reading. Now. Or. Whatever. by Jim Walsh The Thing That Gets His Goat Much has been made of the dumbing-down of newspapers and magazines in this age of computers and television, but the main thing that gets my, and apparently only my, goat is the mass encroachment of subheads on the written word. This Is a Subhead What are subheads? Allow me to explain. I'm not talking about the explanatory secondary headlines that follow the main headlines in any given paper. Those are noble, efficient, one might even say sexy. I'm talking about the pesky and thoroughly unsexy little copy-breakers that various editors or--God forgive them--subhead-snookered writers themselves insert into stories. Like This One Like this one, to give you, the "reader," a break from all that tiresome "reading." I suppose you could say that the subhead trend bothers me because I'm a writer and I try desperately to perfect antiquated stuff. Transitions and Flow Like transitions and flow, and because I think writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm. But the truth is, subheads bug me even more as a reader. Some of the best editors I've ever had have justified subheads to me, explaining that they are necessary "eye candy" and "reader guides" imperative to "reader friendliness." I'm with Stupid All I know is that whenever I read a column or story that's been broken up by subheads, especially a syndicated story that appeared somewhere else first without any subheads, my inner reader feels violated. Walsh: Prima Donna I'm not saying I detest all subheads--some, in fact, are welcome little pauses; sweet exhales in the giant inhale that is reading a newspaper. But their use is out of control. And, try as I might to ignore them, I can't because whenever I trip on one, all I can picture is some editor sitting at a computer terminal, going through some perfectly graceful copy. Unlike This Pile of Crap Copy that would be totally and thrillingly readable and understandable and booty-shaking on its own, with maybe a cool photo or illustration serving as essential aforementioned eye candy. But, because Mr. or Ms. Hack-the-Art has nothing better to do, or has been issued a direct edict from the Corporate Subhead Division or the Let's Foster Skimmers Not Readers Team, what we get are subheads that simply repeat the most obvious language/theme from the upcoming paragraph or artificially created "section." Now, I fully admit that I'm a sick and damaged ink-stained wretch. See, He's Sick and Damaged. Don't Blame Us But I've gotten to the point where I don't even read stories with subheads anymore. I just skim the paragraphs to see what language inspired the subheads. I suppose my skimming supports the media consultants' theory that today's newspaper readers are ADD morons. Can't Keep Their Minds on One Thing Morons who can't keep their minds on one thing long enough to read a story longer than a horoscope, but I beg to differ. I pine for a simpler time and dream of moments like this one, when readers and writers are on the same page. For inspiration, sometimes I go to the archives at the library to look at old newspapers. No subheads. No splashy graphics. No color. No fancy fonts for headlines. Just words. Gray. Dull. Fabulous. Words. Dream. On. Gramps. I've worked in this business long enough to remember a time when subheads didn't exist. These days, editors are so freaked about losing readers and so worried about how little time people spend with newspapers that they've gone subhead nutty. Pink Slip The genius editors at this fine rag would never slap mindless subheads on my flawless prose, of course. Now I realize that I've forever screwed this up for readers of this column, and that you'll never again read a story with subheads and not see them in a new boldface light. But I suppose, dear reader, That Has Been His Intent that that has been my intent.

Much better! Life, me, you, the cities, the world, art--and yes, music, will surely benefit from this revolutionary technique.

(P.S. Yeah, yeah, I'm like a week behind on this thing. I've had the Hounds of Deadlineville on my heels for days, so I didn't have anything clever to add. But alert reader Steve reminded me of its presence and goosed me into action. The Newsdesigner blog! Stale yet mildly amusing!)

>Commence Skimming [Twin Cities City Pages]

3 Comments

I toyed with the idea of changing the name of the site yesterday to "visualjournalist.com" just to tweak Mr. Mangan, but in accordance with the Third Commandment, I decided I would not expose my fellow blogger to ridicule or humiliation. It is an interesting topic he brings up, though:

Something that annoys me: when designers call themselves "visual journalists." It's a problem of semantics that only a copy editor could love: When "visual" modifies "journalist" it creates a subset. Of course they don't mean it because they are nice people, but what they're saying is, "we're visual, unlike the rest of you, who aren't." The thing is, as long our optic nerves, corneas and other parts are in proper working order, we're all visual journalists, which renders the distinction meaningless.

He makes a good point. I dislike the term myself. Seems pretentious.

So, when design types say "visual journalist," what do they mean? I think mainly it's a bid for respect. A "hey, we're journalists, too" cry into the newsroom.

That's fine. The visual parts of the newsroom were treated like second-class citizens for a long time. Still are, sometimes. But you don't get respect by changing your name. I've known plenty of photographers, designers and artists who wanted to be thought of as journalists and yet couldn't be bothered to spell somebody's name right in a caption or have more than the vaguest notion of what was happening in the world. No matter what these people call themselves, they are not respected as journalists by other journalists in the room. They're just the people who decorate the pages with colored bits, too much white space and pictures that are too big.

You want respect as a journalist? Stop making up snooty names for yourself and earn it.

2 Comments

Ol' millionaire Jed movin' away from here to the heavenly Hills of Beverly is a good reminder (as is Side Salad's roundup today) that it's time to start thinking about some of those big obit packages. You just know that Bob Hope and His Holiness (the Pope, not Ronald Reagan) are gonna kick a half-hour before deadline.

>CNN's premature obits [The Smoking Gun]