The black and white candidate
BARACK OBAMA MAY or may not become the first black president, but he is the first black-and-white candidate of this century.
The newspaper disease
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE of the paper, there’s no confusion about who the paper belongs to. Not the editors who built it, not the reporters who fill it with articles, but the men who bought and paid for it. - David Carr
Requiem for a candidate
IS BARACK OBAMA joining the establishment, now that he’s changed his logo from upper-and-lower to caps-and-small caps? I haven’t heard anyone make this charge, but there has been a lot of talk about the branding of the candidates.
Newsmagazines:
A conversation about survival
Amid Capeci, the AME/Design of Newsweek and Arthur Hochstein, the design director of Time, are midtown rivals. I've worked with both designers. Amid was at Esquire when I got there in the early 90s, and I persuaded him to move to Newsweek during one of the four redesigns I've been involved with. He left for a while to go to Rolling Stone, so we have a lot in common!
The last year-end post
IT’S IRONIC, BUT 2007 was the Year of Helvetica. The reason, of course, was the Gary Hustwit documentary film by the same name. I waited until September and the ATypI to see it — and wrote about it then — and now my lingering impression is the role of the great Massimo Vignelli, as a kind of Timothy Leary of modern design. Turn on, tune in, drop out. You need no more than six typefaces.
A milestone on the road
to digital magazines
WITHOUT MUCH FANFARE, The New York Times has introduced an online version of T—the seasonal style sections that used to be called “Part Two’s” of its magazine. The design was done with the help of Createthe, an agency that designed the Calvin Klein web site. You can see the hand of Janet Froelich, the brilliant art director of the magazines, but not the influence of the Times’ famous web designer, Khoi Vinh, who has positioned himself as a mediator between print and online and who tends to favor plain old HTML over flashier technologies.
Interview with Roger Black
FAZ CABER: OUR bosses and news chiefs are not interested in design. Can the editor request to change the layout and place the amount of text that he wants, or is the form more important?
Type as dogma
THIS PAST WEEKEND, the annual Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) conference in Brighton screened the movie Helvetica. This is a fine documentary, directed by Gary Hustwit. It’s been shown at a few other conferences this year, and is now enjoying a small art house run. As one of those who hasn’t used Helvetica since 1970, I was prepared not to like it. But Helvetica, the movie, won me over — mostly by intercutting many striking shots of the typeface in use all over the world, for every possible purpose, and in every situation, from monumental corporate identity to graffiti-covered municipal notices.
Rupert makes his move
THE SALE OF Dow Jones to Murdoch has been greeted by much clucking in the press. Every paper, with the exception of The New York Sun and maybe the Journal itself, seems to have concluded that this is the sad, if inevitable, end to the long, lustrous legacy of a fine journalistic institution. Most columnists point to other supposedly fine papers that were ruined by the man once called the Dirty Digger. Case in point: The Times of London. No one remembers that that gray lady had become pretty frail by the end of the Thomson era. In 1981, when Murdoch took over, the bureau system (which the Times may have invented) was moribund. No longer was there a Times man in every outpost of the Empire serving as an alternative conduit to Whitehall for frustrated foreign ministers. Not that they needed one: the Empire itself was gone.
Eye candy
I MAY BE getting more irritable as I age, which is saying something, but I am increasingly rankled by design that is a superficial visual fix for a complex problem. It seems that the only design that gets attention is “cool”. But you don’t hear about how well it works or how well it solves the problem.
Remember the “print edition?”
HERE IS A simple question: Why don’t newspaper Web sites promote their printed newspapers more? When they first built Web sites, papers crowed about them. They were proud to have gone online, and they wanted everyone to know. There were lots of teasers in the paper about all the stuff you can get on the web. Stories point to more resources. Readers are urged to vote in polls, give feedback to the columnists, and buy cars.
Getting in bed with type
THERE IS FRESH word from Redmond that after all these years we may be able to get more typefaces onto web sites.
A new battle in the Net
WALKING THROUGH THE teaming casino of the Venetian in Vegas on the way to the Microsoft Mix 07 conference last week, you noticed a funny disparity between the way the men and women dressed for gambling. The women were ready for a cameo on a day-time soap opera. The men, with the exception of some older customers who have been to the Zegna shop at Caesar's, looked like frat rats. Shirt tales hanging out, three-day stubble, shorts.
The other shoe drops in Chicago
WELL, THE GOOD news is that Tribune found a buyer. The bad news, for some anyway, is that the Chicago company still owns the Los Angeles Times. Sam Zell (Forbes No. 158), the real estate plutocrat who won the auction, says that he is only in it for the money, and will leave the journalism up to others.
Time for a redesign
LAST FRIDAY, 16 March, Time magazine appeared with a new design by Luke Hayman of Pentagram. (Luke talked about his on-staff redesign of New York on this site in December, and I reviewed the new Time.com a little later.)
This just in from Eustace Tilly
THE NEW YORKER has redesigned its web site, and the design is fine, but the approach to the web seems stubbornly retro. Resolutely anti-Web-2.0. The site seeks no community. And it is absent of dynamic content, although as the author of this very slow blog, I suppose I am not one to criticize. Only the calendar changes every day, and those items just come from the weekly magazine section, “Goings on About Town.”
Flower Power
IN MIAMI, at the We Media conference, the aging curmudgeon in me wanted out. The conference was about “community” and citizen journalism, which is like peace and love nowadays, and as in the sixties, the dialogue polarized.
No deposit, no return
AMERICA IS FILLING up with shipping containers, as anyone who has gone by the Port of Elizabeth on the New Jersey Turnpike can tell you. The Chinese evidently don't want them back; it’s cheaper for them to make new ones. And so Americans are trying to figure out how to recycle them, including turning them into houses, as everyone from Metropolis magazine to Bob Vila have pointed out.
Interview: Opening shots in
the Second Font War
A SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT from Berlow: An on-screen font solution that may save our eyes from being ruined by reading too many web sites.
Next step for the Rocky
THE Rocky Mountain News has moved to a new, delightfully small size. It's really a magazine size, and they are taking advantage of the change to update the redesign I worked on with a team from Danilo Black four years ago. This time there was a much deeper involvement from the staff, including workshops based on the project in Houston earlier last year.
Out of Time
ON THE DAY last week when Time.com’s redesign appeared, I was having lunch with a young magazine designer with a live interest in online media, a combination that is getting less rare. This guy is a survivor of Giant and Shock (if he applies to work on your magazine, watch out), and he asked me what I would do with Time. My first response was that if they held a gun to my head and told me they would pull the trigger if I didn’t come up with an editorial strategy for the leading newsmagazine, I would say, “Go ahead and shoot.”
It’s still the Journal
TUESDAY morning I opened the door, and in front of the apartment across the hall was a copy of the Wall Street Journal. My own was buried beneath The New York Times and the Financial Times, and I had to get the papers onto the kitchen table before I realized that the Journal had changed. It was smaller; less than a foot wide. Last week it would have stuck out of the stack.
A conversation with
Luke Hayman
OVER THE PAST couple of years I’ve become increasingly aware of the work of Luke Hayman, until recently the design director of New York magazine. (Isn’t it refreshing that the title was not “creative director”?) The magazine, with editor Adam Moss, has again become New York’s essential survival guide, and the visual side got better and better.
Clearing brush
SOME people like to be seen clearing brush. At least the President does, probably because Ronald Reagan did, but Reagan’s reason was not clear.
Vertical storytelling
THIS presentation started as a 10-year design review for Magazine World.
Enter Brunehilde, stage right
AS I WAS finishing an entry about the new L.A. Times front page, the fat lady in Chicago stepped onto the stage and began, as predicted, to sing. That is to say, the Tribune, through its new publisher in Los Angeles, fired Dean Baquet, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, even as the empire continued to fall into pieces.
A tale of two Times
IN OCTOBER, two big U.S. papers made some changes.The Los Angeles Times, under siege from its out-of-town owners, unveiled a redesigned front page and typography in the “A” section that at last matches the feature sections.
Soft vs. Hard
THE VERY dry public editor of The New York Times, Byron Calame, asks the question, Can ‘Magazines’ of The Times Subsidize News Coverage?
The view out the side windows
is getting a bit blurry
TIME keeps moving faster, not only for us aging Boomers, although maybe faster for us than even the old people. It seems like just yesterday we had the Font Wars, with Warnock crying on the stage at Seybold.
Modern and austere:
The next generation of newspaper typography?
SEVENTY-FIVE years after the development of Times Roman, there is a boomlet of new typefaces for newspapers. It seems that nowadays you can hardly redesign a paper without one. Custom fonts got going again in magazines in the early 90s, with Rolling Stone in 1977, and picked up steam with the advent of desktop publishing. Newspapers, lagged a few years behind, but by the mid-90s new typefaces were made for specific papers.
How to become a famous designer
OPENING the ATypI conference in Lisbon (in the place of Ellen Lupton, whose flight from Baltimore was cancelled [notes to self: avoid BWI; avoid US Air; allow an extra day for travel to Europe, particularly when giving keynote]), Erik Spiekermann, who is able to speak a the drop of a hat, explained how he does design.
The great unwinding
THE THIRD act of the Tribune’s ownership of the Los Angeles Times opened Thursday, without pausing for an intermission, when the board allowed that it might sell some of the company’s newspapers.
You can take so much cheese off the pizza that nobody will eat it
THE PRINT media continues to lose elevation, and now the heavy freight is being chopped up for fuel, or just jettisoned. Time Warner, Tribune have announced big asset sales. But the death grip of the stock analysts and the media buyers has not relaxed. Further cuts will be needed. Products will get thinner, pages sizes smaller.
Stop the press, they’re putting ads on the page!
A WHILE back The New York Times, announcing that it was going to put ads on the front of the Business section,* mentioned, with a shudder, that the Wall Street Journal was actually going to put ads on their Page One.
“Give it to the monkeys in the back!”
EVERYONE should have somebody like Adie Marks as their first boss.
The last blog
OF COURSE, it’s probably not the last blog, even for me. Wishful thinking. I am just getting started on one so late that perhaps no one can stand to read another, or to comment on it. But here we are. Late to the table is better than no meal at all. The point is to provoke a conversation about media design, and I hope you will dive in.
The intern made me do it
OKAY, okay, okay, it’s red, white and black. I’ve taken a lot of heat since I suggested that the classic print color combination could work well on the web. No one followed this advice, and so most web sites are white, gray or blue. Or a combination.
Last days of the dinosaurs
HARRIS Seigel, the Nils Lofgren look-alike who is one of the stars of the SND, had a header on his slide presentation reading, “Society of News Dinosaurs.” Seigel showed work from the hilarious Asbury Park Press feature section which uses real people in large numbers to tell stories, usually involving alcohol.