Tag: Singapore Newspapers

A Design of Its Time — 1989

Keeping up with the times – the changing look of Singapore’s longest surviving English newspaper The Straits Times.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

 

ST1990cover

Designing a commercial paper

It was only in June 1989, that the paper introduced a “new format.”[i] The first three pages of ST now housed a selection of the day’s top stories and a scaled down summary index in a section called News Focus.

As a sign of how important business interests had become in Singapore, ST’s financial section, Timesdollar, now fronted the back page usually reserved for news. “If you want to get to business and economic news first, you might want to read the paper from back to front – which is the way the business and stock market news has been arranged,” the paper wrote.[ii]

In March 1990, the paper updated itself again and it declared ST to be more “reader-friendly.”[iii] A more consistent look was implemented with standardised logos, writer bylines and tags. In addition, perhaps to differentiate itself from the local financial publication, Business Times, it renamed its economic news section Money, and the paper, which once referred to itself as Times, now called itself ‘ST’.

These changes also reflected a strengthening of its business and brand. ST was now part of SPH that was led by chairman Lim Kim San. The former civil servant introduced a business-like attitude to the newspapers, and to him, a “commercial success was not only respectable but essential for a newspaper.”[iv]

A 1990 design change registering this new direction saw a reduction by one-inch of its width to fifteen-inches. The smaller paper size, it explained, saved newsprint and was in line with newspaper sizes worldwide.

And it also meant advertising sizes that were friendlier to the growing number of multi-national companies in Singapore. The size change also coincided with SPH’s adoption of a multi-million dollar computerised advertising network system that connected it to regional advertising agencies.

The paper also returned to an eight-column grid. While, this made it more readable with wider columns and fewer stories cramped into a page, editorial space was reduced as well, especially with the smaller newspaper size. To make up for this, liveries were simplified. However, this was not too much of a constraint, as compared to twenty years ago, ST now had two times more pages and was regularly running over eighty pages per issue.

Finally, Section Two was renamed Life and the paper pledged to feature a “stronger commentary on the arts.”[v] This was in line with the government’s recognition of the importance of arts and culture in Singapore society after the 1989 Ong Teng Cheong report.[vi]

— — — —

  • [i] “New Format Today,” The Straits Times, June 1 1989.
  • [ii] Ibid.
  • [iii] “ST Is Now More Reader-Friendly,” The Straits Times, March 1 1990.
  • [iv] Turnbull, 369.
  • [v] “ST Is Now More Reader-Friendly.”
  • [vi] Teng Cheong Ong, Robert Iau, Kheng Soon Tay, Edwin Thumboo, Seng Teck Yeo, Arun Mahizhnan, Kee Koon Chia, Hawazi Bin Daipi, Kwong Wah Er, Leslie Fong, Kwong Ping Ho, Haji Suhaimi Jais, Cher Siang Koh, Teck Juan Loy, Siok Tin Wong-Lee and Vincent Yip., “Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts,” Singapore: 1989, 3.

— — — —

A Design of Its Time — 1998

Keeping up with the times – the changing look of Singapore’s longest surviving English newspaper The Straits Times.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

 

ST1998coverThe news magazine

For the next eight years, the paper remained unchanged until its biggest redesign in March 1998. To announce this “major milestone,” [i] ST ran behind-the-scenes stories daily in the week running up to the launch.

This extensive revamp was performed by a team led by former art director of The New York Times and Newsweek Roger Black, his associate Eduardo Danilo Ruiz and ST’s Foreign Editor Felix Soh.[ii] The hiring of an American consultant echoed the international view that American newspaper design was now the standard to follow.

ST’s new look borrowed heavily from magazine aesthetics. As a reader remarked, the paper became “less formal and feels more like a magazine style.”[iii] This approach was to project a “more youthful Straits Times” to attract younger readers who were not reading newspapers.[iv]

To aid reading, stories began with a summary deck featuring a short write-up about the story. New design elements such as quotes and infoboxes broke up the story into interesting bits to appeal to the reader’s attention. The paper also switched to contemporary typefaces: news headlines were in Miller Daily,[v] while the sports section had a separate headline typeface in sans serif, Interstate.

The paper was now in full-colour,[vi] and a greater emphasis was placed on visual journalism. Infographics and photo essays became an alternative to text stories. The different sections, including Classifieds, now came with “covers” made up of a main story and accompanied by promos – “advertisements” with etched out photographs and snappy introductions – of the stories inside.

Underlying all these changes was the need to stay relevant to advertisers. The emphasis on youth assured advertisers that “newspapers are very much alive and well” [vii] and going big on colour was to “create a better environment for advertising”[viii] in the paper too.

The overhauled paper entered the millennium facing an even more competitive media landscape: in 1999, Channel NewsAsia, a television-news channel was launched in Singapore, broadband access also became commercially available allowing Singaporeans to get their news online, and in 2000, the media market was liberalised to allow more players.

— — — —

  • [i] Yip Seng Cheong, “By Design,” The Straits Times, March 16 1998.
  • [ii] ”History in Your Hands…”, The Straits Times, March 23 1998.
  • [iii] Dorothy Ho and Wendy Tan, “It’s a Big Hit!,” The Straits Times, March 24 1998.
  • [iv] Wendy Tan, “Newspapers Ahead of Media Pack ” The Straits Times, March 20 1998.
  • [v] Roger Black, “Modern and Austere: The Next Generation of Newspaper Typography?” http://www.rogerblack.com/blog/next_news_typography, accessed 5 October 2009.
  • [vi] Fook Kwang Han, “Showcasing the Best of ST,” The Straits Times, August 8 2008.
  • [vii] Tan, The Straits Times, March 20 1998.
  • [viii] Ibid.

— — — —

A Design of Its Time — 2000s

Keeping up with the times – the changing look of Singapore’s longest surviving English newspaper The Straits Times.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

 

ST2004coverLooking like the competition

In November 2000, Singapore’s broadcasting company Mediacorp launched its free daily Today, while SPH countered with Streats in addition to setting up two television channels. However four years after, battered by competition and an economic recession, a ceasefire was called. The only survivor was Today, which continues as Mediacorp’s alternative paper to ST.

A month after the announcement, ST unveiled a redesign done entirely by in-house designers. For the first time, news on Asia came ahead of world news with the ASIA section following after the day’s prime news. This was “to reflect the growing importance of the region”[i] to ST’s readers.

More importantly, the paper went “big on lifestyle” as it claimed that readers wanted this more than the news.[ii] Its thirty-one year old nameplate was replaced and typeset in Trajan – a typeface choice for popular Hollywood movies. A feature story section, Upfront, started on the cover and three new weekly lifestyle magazines, Digital Life, Mind Your Body and Urban were also introduced for a more affluent society hungry for information on how to live in a First-World country.

In line with ST’s philosophy for the paper to appeal to the masses, news reports were extracted into full-blown magazines. A format that helped readers quickly get what they wanted and offering the many advertisers from the computer, health and fashion industry a more targeted approach to reach out to its readers.

The fight for the advertising dollar was more competitive now with the extremely advertiser-friendly Today. As the free paper depended entirely on advertisers for revenue, Today had no qualms about having its cover wrapped up in advertisements, and ST soon followed suit. By 2006, the over 100-page paper came in multiple parts each fronted by a section cover. Advertisers were offered to command the cover on any of these sections, except the main section, leaving just a corner flap to indicate that there was still news inside.

A Digital Look

The rise of new media and the Internet led the paper to redesign once more in 2008, the third within a decade. “The pressure newspapers face to remain relevant and attractive to readers has intensified over the last ten years. We can no longer take our readers for granted because there are so many other alternatives available today, especially on the Internet,” said editor Han.[iii]

The redesigned paper would mimic its competition online. The cover was packed with promos of inside stories that resembled links on the front page of a website with broken-up news stories on the cover and jump pages becoming a norm. Mirroring the popularity of online blogs, ST replaced Upfront with a daily commentary column on page two.

Launched together with its latest Internet offerings, the paper created space for the new online ‘section’, Every section cover advertised the most commented and read story from its online website.

By now, Singapore was also gearing up for a greying population. To better serve this audience that probably read the printed ST more than youths, it became elderly-friendly. To aid reading, the paper switched to a five-column grid that meant wider columns. The body text size of its new typefaces was also increased. ST even changed its nameplate, claiming to have been inspired by what it looked like when it first began.[iv]

Like Singapore, today’s ST looks nothing like it did 50 years ago. After all, the newspaper is a cultural product specific to its time of production. “What is significant is not the particulars of the dress but the overall pattern, which reveals our assumptions about the role of the newspaper in culture and its use by common people,” wrote Barnhurst.[v]

To survive in Singapore, ST has increasingly adapted itself along commercial interests, redesigning over the past decade to stay relevant to its readers and advertisers. As a modern business organisation, it now operates on the values of production efficiency, with design and layout increasingly becoming automated and computerised. The daily pages come to designers already laid out with standard-sized advertisements. However, the ubiquity of advertisements limits the variety of overall design and it is arguable that this is why ST has rarely won design accolades given by aesthetically driven organisations like the Society of News Design.

That said, ST’s design works here. In a country, where design is seen a function of aesthetics instead of a functional aesthetic, where design is rooted in trends and driven by commercial imperatives, what we find designed into the pages of the ST is finally but a reflection of the values of the community it serves.

— — — —

  • [i] Fook Kwang Han, “Why We’re Having a New Look,” The Straits Times, October 19 2004.
  • [ii] Ibid.
  • [iii] Fook Kwang Han, The Straits Times, October 19 2004.
  • [iv] Ibid.
  • [v] Barnhurst, 11.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
First published in The Design Society Journal.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —