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Newspaper Design Day

This one-day conference took place last Friday (May 19) at St Bride’s Library, London, featuring the team behind The Guardian redesign. A full room – 200 people? – heard a series of talks loosely arranged in chronological order.

Ex-Sunday Times designer Peter Baistow began the day explaining how UK newspapers used to be created, describing the archaic trade union practices that held back development until the eighties. The idea that a journalist would write on a typewriter than hand the manuscript on to a typesetter who would re-key everything seems absurd now. This was less a technological problem than one of union power – the typesetters refused to let anybody else use their machines, and if special design effects were required the shift leaders would argue over who did the work. Baistow presented using a 35mm slide projector, a suitably old school method to display the world he was describing. A useful context was set for the other speakers.

John Belknap followed, asking the question ‘What is beautiful?’ Starting with an image of a modernist Corbusier villa and describing its architectural beauty, he switched to a picture of a chintzy English cottage to make the point that most people want the latter. And as it is for architecture, so it is for newspapers – the busy, jumbled tabloid world of the News of the World would appear to be what people want.

He showed a wide range of newspapers from round the world, tabloid and broadsheet, upmarket and downmarket, western and eastern languages and alphabets, asking the audience to vote for what they considered beautiful and not beautiful. Old and new examples demonstrated how newspaper design moved on from the early, solid walls of text via larger headlines and images to today’s reader-friendly designs. Nor surprisingly, perhaps, the audience’s preference tended to be for the modernist over the chintz. Belknap’s preference was for the busier, less slick designs sometimes dismissed as ‘vernacular’.

Belknap sought to establish a checklist of attributes for successful newspaper design: beauty, busy-ness, distinctiveness, strong words and inspirational. The thesis was that the more of these attributes that are present, the better and more successful the newspaper, but somehow the message got a little lost in a sea of sales statistics. Most interesting fact: the top-three selling newspapers in the world are Japanese (top seller: 14m copies). Top selling US newspaper: USA Today, 2.6m. And a great quote about the recent redesign of The Observer – according to Belknap the paper has ‘suffered plastic surgery’, a perfect description of the somehow surface nature of that redesign.

Simon Esterson then presented a history of the Sunday Times Magazine. He eloquently described how the Sunday Times Colour Section (as it was first called) was launched in 1963. The magazine has since taken on an almost mythical position in magazine history, as if it were launched with an extended brief to reinvent journalism and reflect the swinging sixties.

Simon explained the simple, prosaic business reasons behind its launch. As its original titles suggests, it was a vehicle for colour advertising, there being no colour in the main newspaper. That it created a unique editorial style was down to serendipity, its distinctive content developing in response to the lack of interest from the main newspaper staff and the production restrictions it faced. A six-week production schedule meant it couldn’t carry news, so new methods of creating editorial content were necessary. Such restrictions forced art director Michael Rand to experiment with various methods of illustration and photography to present the content, developing the unique mix of reportage (Don Mccullin’s Vietnam photo stories) and sixties people (Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Blake).

A strong case was made for the magazine as a truly groundbreaking publication, but I retain a slight suspicion that it may not be quite as essential as claimed. I’ll return to this thought in another post another time, but I do wonder whether looking at a few sample spreads in books and presentations gives you the whole story of how any magazine looked. Other legendary magazines (Twen, Nova) may also have been endowed with an over-inflated reputation. But more later.

After lunch it was time to move to the today, and hear from the people behind The Guardian redesign. First up, editor Alan Rushbridger explained the thinking behind the decision to choose the medium format Berliner size for the relaunch. Much has been said about this subject already, but it was fascinating hearing Rushbridger talking first hand. Some key things that stood out for me:

• At the time of The Guardian relaunch, The Times and The Independent had already done so, publishing broadsheet and tabloid editions at the same time as each other. Their claims that the two differently scaled editions contained the same amount of text were not true; they relied on readers not bothering to compare the two. The new Guardian format ‘let us do text’, combining the authority of a broadsheet with the convenience of a tabloid.
• Analysis of competitors indicated that the move leftward of The Independent and the The Times‘ move downmarket indicated there was space for a serious, politically central newspaper. This comment drifted past without comment but looking back assumes great signifigance. I’m not sure its recorded that The Guardian delibarately moved to the right politically at the relaunch.
• Helvetica was a very difficult face to use for headlines (on the previous design) as it demanded a ‘shouty style’ of headline writing.
• The relaunch is part of a fifteen-year business plan. Much has been made of The Guardian building new presses to enable the new format to be produced, but their existing presses were due to be replaced in two years time anyway. The reduced format also means savings on paper and ink.
• The often-criticised lack of shouting headlines is a deliberate nod toward the way websites present information in an un-hierarchical manner, quite flat compared to most newspapers. There is a hierarchy of stories, but the design uses subtle cues to indicate this.
• The previous redesign by David Hillman (1988) created an initial sharp rise in sales but that soon dropped away once the novelty wore off. The recent redesign had a similar initial spike in sales that has been retained far more successfully.

Overall, Rushbridger confirmed all thoughts that the relaunch was a carefully planned and thought-through process that had achieved what it set out to do for the business by being creatively bold and imaginative.

Highlights of the next speaker, The Guardian creative director Mark Porter:
• The David Hillman redesign was purely a design project. A slide of Hillman’s design proposal showed examples of the old design and his redesign side by side, featuring exactly the same headlines, picture and text. There was no journalistic advance or change in conjunction with the design. The recent redesign was far more extensive, both the content and presentation being overhauled.
• Launched in 1982, USA Today, with its bite-size articles, graphics and colour was the first newspaper ‘for the television age’. The implication being The Guardian is the first newspaper for the Internet age.
• In 1991 Professor Mario Garcia of the Poynter Institute, Florida, used eye tracking studies for the first time to support his ideas about which part of a page a reader naturally reads first. The results of his experiments drew the attention of the newspaper industry to design, and subsequently Garcia has become a leading international newspaper designer.
• Today ‘about 15 people design 95% of the worlds’ newspapers’, all using similar techniques and ideas to deal with the two key issues of reduced attention span and increased competition for time.
• A few newspapers stand out from the crowd, The Guardian being one, Barcelona’s el Periodica and Belgiums’s De Morgen being others. • The Guardian‘s editors, designers, picture editors, journalists and photographers ‘work together to create a magazine-like newspaper’. It seeks to recapture the spirit of broadsheet journalism, and is driven by pictures rather than typography. This links with Rushbridgers’ point about echoing the look of websites.
• He also brought us full circle back to the Sunday Times Magazine, pointing out that space has been found in the new Guardian for a centre spread double page image every day, a rare example of more space being given over to photography.

Next up was type designer Paul Barnes, who along with Christian Schwarz developed the fonts for the new Guardian. He presented that process step by step and like Porter showed early versions of the redesign featuring various fonts. Most interesting was the idea of creating a ‘new’ Helvetica, a starting point for the new typeface that led to failure but set the design team on the decision-making direction toward the final Egyptian font.

He also made the point that the previous David Hillman Guardian logo was an appropriation of a typographic style from ‘trendy culture’. A couple of record sleeves from the time (one New Order, the other I forget) made the point well. The innovative part of the logo design was bringing that typography to a mainstream project.

The day ended with Nico MacDonald discussing the future of news online. He had many interesting things to say about the state of the Internet generally, as well as specifics about how news is presented online. His central conclusion was an appeal for designers to be allowed to take control of the Internet process. Instead of news websites squeezing content into templated web pages, the designer should be involved from the start of the imagining process to ensure online content can be as flexibly presented as, to use a convenient example, the front page of The Guardian can be.

Coincidentally, The Guardian is currently in the process of reinventing it’s website (already one of the most successful news sites), with Mark Porter taking the lead creative role. Assuming this project is as all-encompassing as The Guardian’s print redesign was, then it could be an ideal example of what Nico was talking about: the editor, the designer, the engineer all sitting down together to develop a new way of accessing news.

Nico spoke at length and with many references, all of which are available on his website.

This was a great event and St Brides deserve congratulations for arranging it. Regular readers of this blog will know I love the new Guardian and hearing the principals talk about their work has only strengthened my view that the project is one of the most important pieces of publishing design work in recent years.