Tag: The Straits Times

A Design of Its Time — 1980s

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

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Introduction } 1960s } 1970s } 1980s } 1989 } 1998 } 2000s
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ST1983coverModernising the newspaper

The spur to modernise ST’s design came when a competing newspaper, the Singapore Monitor, entered the market in 1982. By then, Khoo had already retired from ST a year earlier and the paper was now helmed by Peter Lim as group editor[i] and Cheong Yip Seng as editor.

The new team increased the size of the paper[ii] and adopted a “new and more flexible”[iii] editorial voice. Instead of two separate editorials in an issue, it reduced it to just one with the title “The Straits Times says…”.

Lim’s direction for ST was “to design the front page for mass-appeal with in-depth reports on the inside pages, and to make one section popular, while concentrating serious quality material in the other.”[iv]

Such a view was steeped in scientific management, a call for order and efficiency that was also guiding Singapore’s developmental aspirations then.

Prior to this, the paper had developed a page flow over the years: top news, foreign news, local news, sports and entertainment. It was only from December 1983 that these sections were made prominent. Each page was headed with a livery containing its section name typeset in Helvetica and accompanied by an icon.

News snippets, which used to clutter spaces leftover from the main stories, were all housed in mini sections such as World Briefs. Similarly, small advertisements came under a Classifieds section that eventually moved out of the main paper and stood as the third part of ST. These changes gave each page a more regular look – usually one or two big advertisements accompanied by three to four news stories.

To create a more efficient read, the assortment of headline typefaces was replaced with just one in several weights. The index was fully expanded to a full-page In Summary and moved to page two of the now forty-page production.

Forced out of its complacency by the Singapore Monitor, ST became a livelier-looking paper. But this competition came to a close in 1984 when the English, Chinese and Malay newspapers in Singapore came together to form the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) to avoid battling for scarce resources. A year later, as Singapore entered its first recession since independence, the money-losing Singapore Monitor was closed.

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  • [i] Turnbull, 326.
  • [ii] Ibid., 331.
  • [iii] Inside the Editorial,” The Straits Times, October 28 1981.
  • [iv] Turnbull, 332.

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A Design of Its Time — 1989

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

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

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  • [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.

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A Design of Its Time — 1998

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

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

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  • [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.

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