Mila on our trip downtown, Tuesday, July 21, 2009.
The first leg of our trip to visit family in Moscow is complete, and we're off now for a little more exploring.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Trendy newspaper design
Newspaper design sometimes feels like a "rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" kind of endeavor. It's a thankless job, and having done it for awhile, I appreciate it when it is done well.
A big part of the challenge of the work is dealing with the work cut out for you by the wizards who run the business. It is where the admonition to "do more with less" is most apparent.
They have fewer actually designers to do the work, there are fewer reporters and editors producing the content, and they even have to endure the injustice of having less paper -- less space -- to work with. Those incredible shrinking newspapers are a nightmare to make anything meaningful on.
Of course, newspaper designers haven't always helped themselves out much. The whole field is prone to fads and foolishness that occasionally sweeps through. First and foremost is the recent failure to remember that this is a print medium, and however important visual imagery is, it is second banana to the words around it. These aren't picture books, for crying out loud. And many charts, graphs, boxes, and briefs exist simply to eliminate "gray space" -- the design world's unfortunate and obnoxious term for what we old-fashioned folks call "text." Another particularly silly meme was that newspapers should somehow "look like websites." This came from a fundamental misunderstanding of what a newspaper is, and a the kind of ham-handed cross-marketing effort dreamed up in a B-school seminar.
The Hartford Courant bit hard on this kind of stuff, and the newspaper I picked up on recent Sunday on a trip to Torrington bore almost no resemblance to any other newspaper I've seen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The flag was off to the side, the Courant's delightfully weird logo (with a bright red heart, crown, and pigeon holding a telegram) was placed too prominently up top, and you had a hard time finding out where basic bits of info like the price and date. But scrolling down, you noticed that they appeared to have their own second thoughts about the subject...
All this is a great shame, because newspaper design doesn't need to suffer this much. On a recent trip to the UK, Olga brought me back a stack of newspaper, including several of the Sunday broadsheets. In the UK, broadsheet still means "broad sheet." During the week, most of the respectable British papers have switched to a tabloid size, which despite being a major taboo in the U.S., makes a ton of sense. It saves paper, it puts an emphasis on the text, and it gives advertising much more impact (businesses that pay for tiny ads at the bottom of a broadsheet page are wasting their money). But for their Sunday editions, they blow it all out. And suddenly, you realize the value of it -- huge photo spreads, properly constructed in-depth packages including break-out material -- in other words, something worth paying money for and spending some time with.
They have fewer actually designers to do the work, there are fewer reporters and editors producing the content, and they even have to endure the injustice of having less paper -- less space -- to work with. Those incredible shrinking newspapers are a nightmare to make anything meaningful on.
Of course, newspaper designers haven't always helped themselves out much. The whole field is prone to fads and foolishness that occasionally sweeps through. First and foremost is the recent failure to remember that this is a print medium, and however important visual imagery is, it is second banana to the words around it. These aren't picture books, for crying out loud. And many charts, graphs, boxes, and briefs exist simply to eliminate "gray space" -- the design world's unfortunate and obnoxious term for what we old-fashioned folks call "text." Another particularly silly meme was that newspapers should somehow "look like websites." This came from a fundamental misunderstanding of what a newspaper is, and a the kind of ham-handed cross-marketing effort dreamed up in a B-school seminar.
The Hartford Courant bit hard on this kind of stuff, and the newspaper I picked up on recent Sunday on a trip to Torrington bore almost no resemblance to any other newspaper I've seen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The flag was off to the side, the Courant's delightfully weird logo (with a bright red heart, crown, and pigeon holding a telegram) was placed too prominently up top, and you had a hard time finding out where basic bits of info like the price and date. But scrolling down, you noticed that they appeared to have their own second thoughts about the subject...
All this is a great shame, because newspaper design doesn't need to suffer this much. On a recent trip to the UK, Olga brought me back a stack of newspaper, including several of the Sunday broadsheets. In the UK, broadsheet still means "broad sheet." During the week, most of the respectable British papers have switched to a tabloid size, which despite being a major taboo in the U.S., makes a ton of sense. It saves paper, it puts an emphasis on the text, and it gives advertising much more impact (businesses that pay for tiny ads at the bottom of a broadsheet page are wasting their money). But for their Sunday editions, they blow it all out. And suddenly, you realize the value of it -- huge photo spreads, properly constructed in-depth packages including break-out material -- in other words, something worth paying money for and spending some time with.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)