Newspaper Design

Newspaper design, as a specialized area of practice, is a relatively recent addition to the journalism industry. Until the 1960s, the organization of printed elements on newspaper pages depended largely on two main journalistic customs: the first being the standing or repeating elements such as the nameplate and the second being the editor's daily hierarchical decisions for newspaper elements that change according to the day's news stories. Since the nineteenth century, newspapers have divided their available space into editorial content and advertising. These two have become separate production areas, with distinct groups working independently. Newspaper design focuses on the editorial side and is often called editorial design.

Editorial design controls a newspaper's visual presentation. Publishers from time to time mount a redesign project either to plan a complete makeover (an unusual occurrence) or to update existing design gradually. A cadre of independent redesign consultants focuses on the newspaper industry, although publishers may instead use the internal design staff.

Editorial design also includes the daily design activity of staff members, which encompasses the changing visual treatment of news items within the relatively fixed format of a publication: the selection, edition, and organization of all visual elements in a newspaper. Although the newspaper has a set of design rules, these do not resolve the specific problems and applications to individual stories and pages.

Since the 1990s, newspapers have required designers to be visually literate and also to be able to research and write. As one result, [Page 982]newspaper designers are also called visual journalists. Practitioners with both skill sets may come from art schools or from academic journalism programs.

Designers divide content between hard and soft news, distinctions that affect the formal presentation. A features designer concentrates on soft news, such as features, reviews, and other non-timely items, which are more open to variation and experimentation. A layout editor or designer concentrates on hard news production and hews more closely to overall newspaper design guidelines.

Like other areas of visual practice, newspaper graphic design has changed through a series of style developments called movements. Since its emergence, the first main movement in newspaper design was modernism (initially called streamlining), a mid-twentieth-century effort led by newspaper design pioneer John Allan, that removed clutter from page designs (such as, for example, headlines with many words capitalized) in favor of the easier-to-read forms (such as headlines with only the initial word and proper nouns capitalized). The second main movement in newspaper design was functionalism, a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s which Harold Evans of The Times of London led to remove the irregular shapes of story layout (such as doglegs, where one column of type extends below others from the same story) in favor of more compact forms (such as simple rectangles).

Newspapers have generally followed behind the avant-garde of other areas of design practice, such as magazine and product design. They have not, for example, so far adopted postmodern typography, which mixes home-made-looking typefaces in exaggerated sizes that push beyond standard limits of legibility.