Front page design: Some trends continue

Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 2003 by Utt, Sandra H, Pasternack, Steve

A 20-year update of front page design found more newspapers running all photos in 4-color and using offset printing, boldface sans serif type for dominant headlines, digital imaging and computerized pagination systems.

What began as a design revolution for America's newspapers about three decades ago has now settled into more of an evolution-one of subtle page re-designs, myriad offerings of new technologies and adaptation to the design challenges of the online newspaper.

More than 20 years after USA Today made its brash entrance onto the newspaper scene and into daily journalism's design consciousness, newspapers in the United States-at least as defined by their front pages-have never looked better, according to some, or more dull and homogeneous-in the eyes of others.

Of course, change in newspaper design did not begin in the 1970s, but instead has been going on-at several periods, quite subtly-for decades. A study of newspaper design during the inter-war years of 1920 to 1940 concluded that design change was neither sudden nor linear and came about only through experimentation at the newspapers.1

One observer of design trends writes that the era of "design by imitation" is ending and that newspapers are starting to recapture a sense of their individuality in appearance,2 sometimes by going back to what worked well years ago, without abandoning some of the modern features available. Among the "returns" to old style cited: the return of non-modular L-shaped articles and butting headlines.3

Another observer writes that there's a sense among designers that the appearance of American newspapers has reached a plateau, gone flat, and lost its element of surprise.4 Indeed, a trip to multiple U.S. cities would find a high degree of sameness in the look of daily newspapers, in cities large and small, east and west.

It seems an eternity since America's front pages featured small black and white photos, vertical page design and seven column rules separating the eight columns of seemingly endless grey legs of type. Since the 1970s, front pages have been transformed from grey to colorful, from primarily text-based to a regular reliance on various types of art, and from one created with a dummy sheet, pencil and ruler to computer-generated pages that are easier, faster and more versatile than anyone could have imagined a generation ago. The mechanics of page layout have been replaced by the art of news design.

The era has also witnessed the arrival of the design professional, who, at first, and at some newspapers, held the Rodney Dangerfield mantra of "getting no respect;" increasingly today the designers are playing a more vital role in determining newspaper content, and the integration of words and art.

While the 1980s seemed preoccupied with the splash of color, the spread of modular design and the arrival of large, dominant photos, in the 1990s, the focus changed to integrating words and art. Another trend became simplicity of design and ease of navigation,5 particularly with the arrival of the online newspaper in the mid-to-late 1990s.

Even the greyest among the newspapers "cried uncle" in the past few years. The New York Times published a color photograph on its front page for the first time in 1997, and The Wall Street Journal raised a few spot-color eyebrows in 2002, sporting color graphics, pastel tint boxes and trendy section-front promos with little silhouetted photos. Earlier, the once dizzyingly vertical Los Angeles Times sported a new look aimed at making the paper more inviting while responding to the use of smaller newsprint width.6 (In recent years, several newspapers7 adopted a 50-inch web width, which is becoming the new industry standard.8 This has made the newspapers slightly smaller, cutting slightly the cost of newsprint-and it has had an effect on page design for the newer, smaller pages).

Despite the advances of the past years, design at newspapers is still sometimes seen as distant cousin to content, often defined as "text." A 2002 study of reader satisfaction conducted by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University found that design was not on the list of content-related areas focused upon.9 In a list of what makes a newspaper "easy to read" another study reported that ease of navigation does not center on design or placement of articles. In fact, when the researchers tested design components such as use of photographs, graphics, color, headers at the tops of stories, indexing, placement, jumps and anchoring-they found none of them related statistically to ease of reading.10

The future of newspaper design is difficult to predict, but a panel of experts generally agreed on some basics: the Internet will play a major role in influencing news design; the use of graphics to tell a story will continue to grow; the emphasis will be on delivery of information rather than on looking "cool."11 One area key to the future of newspaper design relates to the online newspaper, which offers both opportunities and challenges: There are no length restrictions on articles; the news hole can be said to be infinite. Navigation by readers is aided by maps, hyperlinks and bookmarks, rather than the traditional eye movement, jump lines, etc. But, most observers agree that the bedrock principles of good design from the printed newspaper-balance, contrast, proportion, simplicity-carry over onto the on-screen version.