What is a newspaper typeface?

Ramiro Espinoza

Hi there,

I am interested in reading / researching about what is currently understood as a 'newspaper typeface'. In your opinion, what are the (technical and aesthetic) features that make a typeface optimal for newspapers? Can you recommend good books or articles on this subject?
Also, what are the fonts that you think constitute the archetype of a 'newspaper typeface'.
Thanks in advance.

PS, I've found this book to be useful: Historia del periódico y su evolución gráfica, by André Gürtler.

AbiRasheed

not an expert or anything but things that come to mind are ink traps, saving ink.

Stephen Coles

Besides the obvious functional characteristics (serif, sturdy, spatially efficient), newspaper text faces tend to be fairly "conservative" in personality. By this I mean they rarely stray too far from what is historically common in newspaper design — which in Anglo-American countries is most often in the Ionic/Scotch genres. One reason for this conservatism is that newspaper readers tend to be loyal, longtime readers of their particular paper, so they notice (and are annoyed by) very small changes in design. Another reason is that newspapers want to present as neutral and authoritative, and this style of type has come to represent those attributes.

Mark Simonson

Also, one of the common characteristics is efficient use of space (high character count for a given area relative to type size), so they tend to be fairly compact and dense, designed for tight line spacing.

Cory Maylett

I was the design director at a daily newspaper for several years, so I'm somewhat familiar with the issue.

The choice of a newspaper typeface involves aesthetics, personality, legibility and all those other considerations that, really, apply to most any project. What makes a newspaper different is also having to consider the high-speed web press printing and cheap newsprint.

Newsprint is highly absorbent, so dot gain is a big factor. Dot gain, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is the tendency of ink to spread out a bit as it soaks into the paper. This isn't a huge problem with headlines, but for body copy and smaller text, like credit lines, a regular weight typeface can start looking like a rather inelegant bold version of itself where counters begin to fill in and delicate subtleties disappear.

Newspapers are typically printed on high-speed web presses that are optimized for volume instead of quality. Ink coverage is also optimized to accommodate paying advertisements. For example, a full-page, solid-color ad might cause the pressmen to dial back the ink coverage to prevent ink set off onto other pages in the signature, but this also has a tendency to lessen the amount of ink laid down on those other pages. In other words, a very light typeface at small point sizes can almost disappear into an illegible ghost of itself. Similarly, a typeface with large differences between thicks and thins can simultaneously have thick strokes bulking up due to dot gain while having the thin strokes and serifs almost vanishing.

These aren't huge considerations for headlines, and newspaper printing quality has improved enormously over the past few years. Even so, it's still important to use sturdy, highly readable faces that can hold up under this kind of abuse. As already mentioned by AbiRasheed, ink traps come in useful for mitigating the effects of dot gain blurring. Also, newspapers are meant to be read, of course, and people can be very fussy about what typefaces they've gotten used to in their newspapers. As a result, the typefaces used on anything but artsy, feature pages tend to be more conservative and less experimental, as Stephen mentioned.

For what it's worth, at the paper where I worked, we used Franklin Gothic for headlines, cutlines, bylines and similar things. The standard body face we used was Nimrod.

Craig Eliason

Spatial efficiency has been mentioned but particularly I think of stunted descenders. 

Nick Shinn

Indeed, short descenders are advisable for body text.
Both because narrow columns of auto-justified text (and in newspapers body text is almost always justified) can easily create rivers and islands (ascender-descender accretions), and because tight leading is de rigueur—in North America the standard size of web rolls has decreased, along with circulation and profits, as a cost-cutting measure, and therefore the pressure is on for maximum copy-fitting.

Body text sizes are generally larger in North America than in Europe, again putting pressure on maximizing character count.

Also, the trend is for a more magazine-like like quality, both in terms of content (as TV and the Internet have usurped news immediacy), and print resolution. Therefore, size-specific (“optical size”) fonts are useful, for matching the degree of fine detail in heads, decks and body.

Luke Freeman

Recommend Christian Schwartz for his approach into design type for newspapers and web.

Bianca Berning

Rob McKaughan focused on newspaper typefaces in his dissertation about pattern language in type design. Try to get hold of that or read about it here. 

Nick Shinn

Also, what are the fonts that you think constitute the archetype of a 'newspaper typeface'.

An Anglocentric view:

The (Scotch) Modern is the archetype, as this was the body text style used by the first significantly mass-circulation newspapers in the UK in the mid 19th century, notably Lloyd’s Weekly and The Illustrated London News. Steam-driven rotary presses, rail distribution and the abolition of newspaper taxes were responsible for the quantum jump. The Illustrated London News was at 200,000 weekly by 1855, Lloyd’s at 400,000 by 1865.

The Scotch Modern was also prevalent in the golden age of newspaper publishing, when daily circulation for papers such as Pullitzer’s The World reached one million, from the 1890s (with the introduction of Linotype and the massive and widespread increase of circulation which occurred in that decade) until the introduction of Linotype’s “Legibility Group” in 1931. Here is a spread from the brochure introducing Excelsior, showing the displacement of the Scotch Modern (although it continued to be widely used for another 30 years). Note that the Legibility types were moderns with vertical stress, it wasn‘t until the 1960s that new news faces started to acquire old-style and transitional qualities, e.g. caps shorter than ascenders—and old-style news faces are still a rarity.

Prior to the Legibility Group, Linotype showed Modern Nos. 1, 10 & 16 in its 1923 Manual, as well as its Scotch.

I term these Scotch Moderns, to differentiate from the original didone or modern types (Didot, Bodoni) on the one hand, and the “Transitional” Scotch Roman on the other. Their most distinguishing feature is the “pot hook” tail of /R and /a (see below in white).





Timeline: the primacy of newspapers as a news medium was challenged by movie-house newsreels (from the teens), radio (from 1925) and television (from the late 1940s). US dates.

Luke Freeman

This is more based on commissioned font projects for newspapers.

Would consider fonts designed for a newspapers when approaching a redesign. The font seems to encapsulate a newspapers: brand, audience, readers etc. Then the other side is fonts are not just for print anymore, they are embedded on various digital platforms.

If you look at font designs for newspapers, either the font has to solve a problem in print and in digital form, while at the same time work towards the vision of editor, director or design team.

When designing a font for Newspapers it seems the font not only has to support the redesign of the layout, must test the course of time and not become phase out in a short amount of time. I say that if you look at a font/typeface for newspapers they become the newspapers identity.    

Here are some related links for the redesign on the Independent Newspaper, it's a nice to hear from a Editorial Designer and Type Designer on their view on the importance a font can have towards the design of a newspaper.

Article:
https://www.creativereview.co.uk/the-independent-redesigns/

Matt Willey



Henrik Kubel

https://youtu.be/aA3Vl4ZLtbA?t=1397


Links on Times 



Dan Rhatigan on Times and newspapers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7hgQ_MXL8k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szpBcBG9Vdw

Maurice Meilleur

Not sure how far you can generalize from one example, but Gerard Unger designed Swift's outlines to be able to withstand slight compression or extension to accommodate whatever-it-takes copyfitting in newspapers. That was clearly widely practiced at least by the clients/end-users he had in mind in the 80s and 90s, and I would guess still is?

Alfonso García

Ramiro, I made a work on newspaper type for my postgraduate course in Buenos Aires. 

https://issuu.com/fonzo/docs/tif_2012_garc__aa_i.pdf

First part is a sinthesis of the book by Gürtler that you have mention, with some personal insight and this paper from Victor Gaultney: http://gaultney.org/jvgtype/wp-content/uploads/BalanLegEcon.pdf

I hope you find it useful.

Saludos!

John Savard

Historically, the primary distinguishing property of newspaper typefaces is a large x-height. The use of Scotch Roman for newspapers was characteristic of the 19th Century in the United States, and persisted somewhat longer in Britain.

The first of the Linotype legibility faces, Ionic No. 5, was a light Clarendon. Corona, one of the most popular of that series, resembles Century Expanded somewhat.

In addition to large X-height, attention is paid to things like ink traps, and counters - things like the open space in the top half of a lower-case e - are made as large as possible.

Incidentally, Melior was designed as a newspaper typeface.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

I have a good-size folder of articles I've collected about newspaper type and typography. The best one was from Typografischen Monatsblätter.

To me the most notable thing about a newspaper face is that it has to be ugly.

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland

To me the most notable thing about a newspaper face is that it has to be ugly.

Well, I actually kind of like these newspaper fonts and don’t consider them ugly TBH.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Of course taste varies, and text face designers naturally develop a deeper, more functional grasp of beauty. But I think my theory generally holds for users. Maybe a better phrasing is: "has to have a certain ugliness".

LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland

Ahh; now I understand! You mean newspaper-type users have to have a certain ugliness. Fair enough.

John Savard

I would put it this way: with a large x-height, and with open counters, newspaper type has to lack certain features that suggest grace and delicacy. That does not mean that it cannot be designed with aesthetics strongly in mind; that does not mean that it cannot be beautiful in some respects.

But when you combine those deficiencies with a need to be very familiar and comfortable to a wide range of ordinary readers, it is likely that the resulting face will not be all that interesting to those whose primary interest is aesthetic and not practical.

I would not call Melior ugly; but then, I would not call Corona ugly either, and yet I can understand that some might feel that way. However, of late, the technical requirements of newspapers have changed, as they're now being printed by offset lithography instead of by stereotype, and that has reduced the problem.

Kent Lew

However, of late, the technical requirements of newspapers have changed, as they're now being printed by offset lithography instead of by stereotype, and that has reduced the problem.

By “of late” I suppose you mean since roughly four decades ago.

Offset lithography certainly improved control and consistency in the printing of newspapers.

But the paper is usually quite thin and absorbent (to differing degrees in different shops), and the presses run at very high speeds. So, unique challenges do remain.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

> But when you combine those deficiencies with a need to be very familiar and comfortable to a wide range of ordinary readers, it is likely that the resulting face will not be all that interesting to those whose primary interest is aesthetic and not practical.

I think the first part of that passage alludes to something more than simply lack of interest. This can get philosophical rather quickly (turning off large swathes of practically-minded designers) but to me it's a difference between conscious taste and the needs of the subconscious; if one agrees that the two have their differences, and latter is more relevant the more we aim for immersive reading, it follows that there's a certain ugliness that must be allowed to manifest. Good examples of this: ungainly short descenders, particularly in the binocular "g"; and trapping, which very few people enjoy noticing.

Something like Melior doesn't have to be seen as ugly per se; but I put forth that giving it more of a subconscious-accommodating ugliness would help it read better, especially in adverse conditions. So, a matter of degrees.

Nick Shinn

Press gain is not so much of an issue with oldstyle or transitional faces. The problem for newspapers was the predominance of didones, and crude printing, but that is history now.

My strategy for the Pratt fonts, for a paper which has both coated and uncoated sections, was not grading, but an oldstyle (with large x-height and short descenders) that has robust micro-detailed serifs and fine tapered joints; that way, large amounts of press gain are accomodated on the glyph as a whole, yet the details prevail when printing is finer.

Historically, Fortune magazine in the 1930s had both coated and rag pages, set in Baskerville. The difference in effect was ridiculous, but so what?