Tag: Newspaper Design

February 9, 2009

What type of newspaper are you?

A day before ST’s latest redesign launch, the typeface for its masthead was changed from Popular (only shred of it left is in ‘THE’) to Big Caslon, said Peter Thomas Williams who was part of the redesign team. While Popular failed to live up to its name, because it was thought to be “western” and “old-looking”, Peter, who is also design editor of my paper, said that the biggest factor when he chooses typefaces in his eight years of working in Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), is actually cost.

While he declined to go into specifics, one can do the math based on price lists online. Purchasing one typeface like Big Caslon for use on up to 1000 computers would already cost more than S$5,000. Considering the ST redesign itself involved about four typefaces, multiply that to the cost of installation for more than a thousand computers in SPH and one begins to see how cost becomes a major factor in his typeface choices.

It was on such an “extreme budget” that led Peter, who used to work in a design consultancy in Ireland and as a visual communications lecturer in South Africa, to draw the nameplate of SPH’s Indian diaspora newspaper, Tabla, instead of purchasing a typeface. This was based on three different typefaces: Popular and Calvert for Tabla and the exclamation mark from Bauer Bodoni, which he felt looked like the Indian architectural style.

Costs aside, another important factor is the amount of space a typeface takes up, especially for use as body copy. If it is designed for newspaper use, a typeface is usually efficient in its space management, having a shorter x- and y- height (think shorter x and y and applied to all 26 letters) and kerning (space between letters) is even. A typeface that takes up too much space would mean story lengths have to be shortened to keep the same amount of news on a page. “If you choose a typeface that is beautiful but it is knocking off four paragraphs, it is useless.” he said.

A final factor in choosing a newspaper typeface is how intricate it is as newspapers are printed on paper quality that is “like toilet paper”. Thus, a font with intricate serfis would not come out looking good as the ink is likely to seep causing such details to be lost.

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In the next part of this interview, The Paginator asks Peter how it was like redesigning ST twice, The Sunday Times and My Paper.

February 8, 2009

FOUND: Visual Thinking and Thoughts

This was how Peter Ong explained visual thinking in a 1994 AMIC paper where he also championed the importance of packaging and design so that newspapers stayed relevant to readers. The way to do so is to be, what I call, a total journalist.

According to Peter, such a journalist should:

Integrate themselves fully into the design process
Learn to think graphically
Look for graphic potential in every story
Collaborate with sub-editors and artists in the final packaging of their stories

The New Paper is one local English paper that I think has such journalists as one can see from how prominently they use infographics. I believe they are the only paper with the post of Infographic Journalist. You can see an archive of their works online here. Below are three of my favourites:

I love how this infographic not only served to categorise the price increases across different sectors but more also how it acted as a distinct visual element to convey the idea of price hikes so simply! Great layout too.

Here, the process of setting up the Singapore Flyer is well explained and readers get a sense of the scale of this world’s tallest observation wheel as it is compared with other megastructures around the world.

The details that go into this one show that infographics need not be simple, but can be jam-packed with information if it is well-designed. I like how the outline of a person is place on the chair to show how comfortable it might be to sleep in one of these seats. The big picture is not forgotten as the detail on the bottom left corner lets the reader know where this chair is in the plane.

February 2, 2009

Making sense of Chinese Newspaper Design

One of the things that has fascinated me is how do Chinese tabloid newspapers such as Lianhe Wanbo (WB) and Shin Min Daily News (SM) get away with such designs?

At first glance, you are overwhelmed by the number of colours and things going on in a single page and every rule of design is seemingly broken. But on closer inspection, you realise that like most newspapers, the content does not escape from the modular system as each story and its elements is contained in a single rectangle box. In that sense, order remains. Plus, as tabloids, its design does not have to show the kind of restrain a reader would expect from The Straits Times and TODAY.

Curiously, both papers have chosen to stick to the broadsheet size instead of the tabloid size (think The New Paper) usually associated with such sensationalist journalism.

Printing considerations aside, might there be historical and cultural reasons behind it? Both papers come out only in the evening when readers are returning home after work so there is probably no need for the convenience that a tabloid size provides for papers like my paper and TODAY. The other possible reason might be that its readers tend to be older, thus text size has to be big enough and a broadsheet format is more cost-efficient as more stories can be fitted into less pages. But even so, some readers struggle to read the papers, see here.

Finally, as its general readership is the working class, I think these Chinese newspapers’ design actually compensates for their reader’s general lack of interest in reading too much words. But design aside, reading these papers still gives me a headache when all the news I get is about teenage pregnancy, a 105-year old grandma passing away after dinner and celebrities committing suicide…

You can check out more WB covers here and SM covers here.