Interfacetious

Note for You: There appears to be some public interest in my conference notes, that I take at most conferences for my own learning. If there is anything incorrect, please email me and I will add your comments (dave lab6 com). I type these conference notes for personal use, pretty much stream-of-conscious style, so my pronouns get all messed up and confuse comments from the speakers and myself, and my typing is not accurate so its full of typos. I'm also usually paying attention to email/rss and anything google-worthy that gets mentioned, so probably a lot of things are misquoted and not even true at all. Apply common sense

1030 Start

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Peter Baistow - From Flong to Film and Beyond

Associate Design Editor of the Sunday Times for almost 30 years.

Start with a brief history of newspapers in the UK. Starting with Fleet Street (image of like 150 years ago, and today with the RadFord News & Wine shop) There arent many newspaper sellers on fleet st today. (images of pic (?) circus and such at the turn of the century) (image of paris newsstand today full of magazines instead of newspapers) Newspapers really starts with the bayeaux tapestry (image of it) informally known as 'queen matiltas tapestry', and note that its made by men not women as we might prejudicially think

Newspapers started in the 15thC (?) and there were lots of books and ideas flowing in the culture of that time, and typefaces like Caslon. The next big change in the technology was when we went to photosetting (image of a sample sheet to test kerning) Newspapers were the same until then as from the beginning of the 17thC, in the UK.

The USAs press was initially politically agitaged newspapers, in the same way as the UKs. They were read in the coffee houses of the day. By the early 19thC there was lots of competition, the Times cost a penny and charged 6. This was about a days wage, and was essentially a tax to keep the information exclusive and fill the government coffers. There were also tabloid forerunners that documented murders.

The 1819 riots in manchester, the cotton field unionists riots, are interesting in the different way the classes of paper covered them (images of Times' map of the riots vs a specialist union newspaper's of an illustration style image instead of a map, making it look like loads of people comparatively. 19 people died in these riots, serious stuff, the poll tax riots of its day. It prompted births deaths and marriages to be recorded, the first education bill and such.

image from 1848 of the first chartists meeting in London published in a newspaper. Wow, amazing that it was this early on, this is like one of the first photos printed in a newspaper!)

The technological advances sped up from that time onwards; there is a type museum in brixton worth a visit that documents some of this (images of monotype machines) and it was in the 1960s and 1970s that production changes really came in.

Until then they handset type into embossed cardboard - called a cliche - and that would cast the metal plate that would be printed thousands of times. (That is where the phrase cliche comes from, btw) The printing and distribution became mechanised at the end of the 19thC. This is the reason that Britain that has more daily newspapers than any other country - a small island, a comprehenseive network that enables things to be published in london as well as macnhester and glasgow, and the delivery system to newsstands, meant people could pick up a copy of the daily paper on their way to work like nowhere else.

At the turn of the century, after 2 education acts in 1870 and 1902 where education became compulsory, fulltime and up to secondary level, so for the first time you had a semi-literate population, and that meant the market for mass sales opened for the tabloids. 'The Daily ILLUSTRATED mirror' had a massive engraving of a woman in 1904. Only a few years later the halftone process arrived and they printed photos similary - the lads mag of the 1910s.

image from 1911 with impressive layouts of images) (image of the Times doing multi-depth single colomn articles)

Between the wars families bought 2 papers, and the times kept its austere appearance. ww2 meant rationing of paper, limited to 4 pages. the express had a chaotic layout, but it appealed to a wide audience.

My family has been working in the presses for 3 generations, so I remember stories told to me about the papers at this time - its said we bleed ink not blood :-)

The sunday times introduced a colour supplement in the 70s, but i think their best issues were in black and white. but the work practices that had been there for 200 years were still there when I joined in the 70s.

when i joined you couldnt touch anything, you had to stand and point. i got a good working relationship with the team. you had type, images, but it had to be set by the printer, we just provided an overlay. You could achieve subtle layouts, but everything must be drawn by hand and so it took 3 days to set. a lot of negatives are languishing in woping from when all these printshops closed. a lot of things were stuck in warehouses by the river, so they that rotted until the kids got in and threw them all over the place. all those images of price charles from back then, we got from our picture library.

in woping, we moved to cut and paste, no longer hand drawing, but our philosophy was still ingenuity. all the artwork was made individually and pasted up, so it was now 1/2 a day instead of 3 days. the graphics were hand drawn with mechanical tints laid on, compared the to the subtle and complex things we see today.

restrictions on the printing quality means traditional line drawings (images of these from 1978) were often used, and the business pages were similarly livened up with cartoons. today its the skill of individual designers who make all the images in Photoshop, and in terms of control it is complete for the designer.

The cover of the times in the 1980s was another big step forward. the main section of the paper remained black and white though. Today a spread is made with adobe photoshop and illustator, and it makes a completely different look.

we use illustation a lot, but perhaps today individual illustrators get less commission as so much can be done in house with technology. digital photos, before you could hardly see the ball as the exposure was so long, and my father said before the war in manchester they used to have prepared photos of the ball to airbrush over the top as the balls got elongated from the exposure lag. Its funny to compare that to today where photos are laptoped and sent straight to the newspaper in almost real time.

So when we moved to comptuers, layouts on the screen was liberating compared to the black and white days.

Electronic retouching happens; in the Times' Style supplement, every blemish and every vein is taken out. Students Ive taught say 'we all know it goes on and we take it at face value', but I feel it might effect our young peoples expectations as it can create a completely false impression. we had a photo of northern island that was cropped to look like a real confrontation, and we were taken to the press council and lost. so beware about that kind of thing...

One paper once airburshed out a woman in a wheelchair and lied saying it was a technical decision when clearly it wasn't. in the 70s theres an interesting upside down L shapred crop (we later hear that this is now quite fashionable as new and trendy newspaper design, haha) and also this amusing image of a cropping in the shape of a windmill on a windmill story.

ads sometimes get badly placed next to articles about the opposite of what the other is about - fat men next to articles about ethiopians and such.

in the last few months ive seen ads placed across the middle of spreads. the ad totally dominates the pages with this. newspapers are meant to make money for the people who own them, and thats a reality we have to face. tabloids can have almost identical covers (image of sun and mirror that are uncanny) and broadsheets are more and more tabloid like these days.

nearly half the page of the front cover of a recent independent is used for self publicity for the paper itself. i prefer the news yknow....

1115

q&a

q: ?
a: the anarchic way in which shifts ran themselves meant complicated layouts got left to the end and so took 3 days. now it takes 3 hours.

q: ?
a: we went from metal to paper, so we did paper artwork on grid sheets that were cut and pasted then shot onto film and the newspaper made from that. a lot of us have experience of that kind of artwork. when the times left gradestone road, and employed printers from portsmouth who were prepared to cross the picket line, and being deunionised (although Im still in the NUJ and my family has a tradition of union membership) meant i could do the artwork in many cases. but transitioning to screen based production, we had 2 days training and were told to get on with it. the same with the quark to indesign switch - we had 2 or 3 days fulltime training and then we got on with it. before, we were restricted, and the move to paper and then screen got more and more liberating. now there are editors at the telegraph who take their own photographs. people take photos on their mobile phones that have a news value that pros cant get. all designers should start writing and editing straight away as we all need to be multiskilled. (great point :-)

q: ?
a: toning was started in 1882 in france, putting an image through a screen onto metal. (?)

was there anything better about the restrictions of metal? yes, i had no formal training, i did fine art at st martins art college, and i enjoyed the restrictions of metal type. it had evolved over 200 years and restrictions were both technical and easthetic. 18 24 30 42 48 were the headline point sizes, so we had a controlled looking paper, and the editor was very aware of that, and we stuck to those rules. a discipline now that we dont have and it depends if we like designs that are flowing, screaming and shouting, but personally I dont like that so much.

q: we can combine old technique with new technology - isnt that always the best way?
a: well, sometimes you can knock off half a point size to make it fit. i think yes we should have that discipline and be more watchful of editors.

nico q: i suggest designers sketch things on paper with pens before they start on screen.
a: broadsheet pages are still drawn on grids with felt tip pens. why? if you have the news editors all looking at a small screen, its very claustrophobic, poking at the screen saying do this do that. on a big bit of paper, you can convey an image through the layout, mark on the paper, and then reproduce that on screen. also at the sunday times, most people only look at photos on screen, the picture researchers spend all day looking at thumbnails in galleries. its not at all satisfactory imo. i mentioned the beauty of black and white prints, so there are enormous advantages and also big disadvantages to the liberation.

1125

simon esterson - rise and fall of the color magazine

worked on the guardian, art director of blueprint, Sight and Sound, Domus, and is a Royal Designer For Industry.

there has been immense growth of color, its everywhere, and magazineification of newspapers, the multisection nature of papers today. but i want to look back at the historical moments and origins of these things.

so, the sunday times magazine was the pioneer of this in the uk. its peak period was the 60s 70s and early 80s though its still here today.

in feb 1962 the cover of the sunday times was in colour. there were 2 tv channels, itv and bbc1, and both in b&w. all papers were in b&w, badly printed, and not many photographs and what there was was badly printed. this was the world the times magazine was born into.

ed tomson (?) who owned the times at the time lived in canada, and the color section was invented for car advertising. they employed mark wotster (?) who is now famous as a cartoonist, a witty guy in the 60s and 70s, but also was a magazine editor and designer. he was hired as art director on the queen magazine. also dennis hamilton, the editor fo the sunday times, was transferred in. The sunday times at that time had 2 sections and a 3rd section was joined later by the busienss and news sections.

Under harry evans the sunday times had a great time, but hamiltons period was also great. the country was poised on the start of the 60s, a great change in the english culture. thefirst cover has the quintisessential icons of the early 60s.

the truth of the first few years was that there wasnt much color in it though, inside. it was an ad vehicle and so only a bit that was in color was the ads. the early issues were complicated, and though it invented the form of the color magazine it paid homage to the weekly illustrated magazine, woodcut magazines from the 19thC onwards, and their sensibility informed the early years of the sunday times magazine.

it took 6 weeks between laying out a page and it being printed. this only shrank to 4 weeks over the 60s and early 70s. you could get great color on cheap cylinders but it took time to set up. so you couldnt do news, and this helped the magazine, as it forced them to work in a different way to a newspaper; it had to anticipate or do background research on things. so there were a lot of techniques for making stories that you could work on months before publication.

an issue from april 1964 had a big art piece on the cover, and the other key figure in the sunday times magazine's history, michael rand, had arrived. his carreer was amazing, starting in 1963 and not retiring until 1994. (image of a dynamic arrangement of verticals and horizontals). at this time they realised they didnt need long articles with photos, they could do large images with small captions.

there was an energy in the magazine, paying the glamour off the grime, and this added energy to the ads. a cover from 1966 with vanessa redgrave, and readers dont see it until they bought the paper, and so there isnt a big headline, its only headling is a small 24pt 'vanessa' - in the 60s you didnt need to know more to know who it was.

the sunday times pioneered ways of telling stories. eg, a 1965 attempt to tell the story of the battle of waterloo, a big photo of the field today, and photos of toy soldiers from a shop, photographed and used as illustrations, with a manouver map, tufte style. and full page bled photos of the a uniform recovered from the battle, complete with sword holes.

rands career before the sunday times magazine was at the express, drawing diagrams of how the train crashed or how the plane took off, telling narratives in images, really influenced the Sunday Times Magazine like this.

another big tekniq was big scaling of a black and white grainy photo with a reportage color photo and a big big drop cap. in 1964 this wasnt amazing for magazines over the world, but it was pretty neat in a free coloured newspaper magazine.

or, how can we show how the new triumph 3200 was made? we take it apart, lay out all the parts, and label them across the bottom of the page. Again, innovative for our class of publication.

a 1969 cover of the vietnam war. well, bad news for the world is good news for papers, and this is similar today with our current war reporting. awesome photo of a guy running and chucking a grenade. 2nd spread has amazing contrast between color and black and white - the print was all color by now but stil used b&w images for effect like this. massive full spread bled image with caption along the bottom. that famous one of the dead viet guy with his stuff laid out (that was controversial because the photographer laid it out for the image)

the magazine ran mixed stories, changed the pace, so heres a slow story with beautiful images of horses on a farm, again full spread and bled wth very minimal captions. theres no grandstanding typography, its functional, journalistic, and photo-led.

mike rand had seen aldrige working as an artist, asked for drawings, hated them, asked his to paint his assitants mini, and he went on to be the famous 60s artist, and art director of penguin books.

an issue that highlighted an early heart transplant with the wave of the heart machine as the cover image, and full spread bled image of the open heart surgery, with no captions. real photojournalism, that.

spread of article with b&w images tinted bright colors to create strong illustrationy spread.

when david keen arrived as art editor, and rand was art director, keens made the layouts stronger and bolder than ever. (image of elvis, caption 'the king is dead' cover, and a spread of a pained and fat old man)

siimarly, a big thick black border and b&w police images, on a spread oppsite a similar bright red border and color image of the woman murdered. 1969

the 70s, storng layout of constructiveist imageery now so familar but ehn unseen. after keen left he went to russia many times and collected a lot russian revolutionary imagery, maybe the best colleciton outside of russia. theres a book about stalin tippexing out people from photos, and he has collected the images over time so you see the people disappear.

there was always a division between the main paper and the mag. in 1972 a newspaper edutor moved to the magazine. he was told they were 'a funny lot that needed a bit of journalism knocked into them'. when he saw the images of vietnam, rand asked him what he thought. 'i thin you should run them'. "when they were printed on 32 pages without ads interrupted, i got it: this WAS journalism." life was more interesting in the mgazine, and he could do real journalism there.

ive missed a lot of the vanessa redgrave type stuff. roy thomsson famously said at the staart 'this is going to be a disasater'. it took a few years for it to take off, and an ad market for the color magazine did emerge, and now everyone has color magazines.

the best of the rest: the new yrokr tims magazine. the auesterity, the seriouis newspaper, means the amagazine inhereited that,

1200

q&a

q: telegraph started printing its color mag in germany and imported it
a: yeah it was the same at the STM

q: the contirubion was distributio of ideas, not new graphic ideas?
a: it was both; trying to be a mirror to life, a committment to teaching people how to do tsomething; a btit school like now but then it was different. articles about how to ski, how to cook, how to do your garden. the guardian used to giveaway these big pullouy posters 'these are lal teh apples' 'these are all the birds', and at the time no one was donig that. inforatmon graphics and differen tkinds of phtogrpahy were crated. the essense of splitting image came form the illustations from the sunday magazine. at directino is about asking what th eidea is and reintenting or interprpeting it. visual journalism is about the image and the cpation, not adding to a article. editors find, select and organise material, and that still happens with photos.

theres a balance between the editorial and the advetisng parts - the ads want to split up the stories and insett thesemlves, the editors want contigious stories.

1215

john belknap - could ugly be beautiful?

the best designed papers seel the fewest. the guardians seel 257,000 (?)

so let start start and talk about 'are these beatutiful'

independent recently, sun recently, a japense recently, a wall st journal recently - beautyful? old fashioned? uniqe?, a korean paper, a germa broadsheet and tabloid (peopl eliekd this), a tiny basque paper with a 4000 circluation, The Herald, the NYTimes, who thikns its boring? yes. disticiive? no.

A thai paper, the Chicago Tribute, very traditional USA design. The Mirrors gaudy-tastic.

10 minutes, an A4 paper in france.

The Daily Mail, Daily Express is a bit more boring.
Die Zeit - eatufily, uniqe? yes.

A paper in Urdu.

Telegraph, another Japanese

redesigned Guardian. like it? yes. beutiful and pretend mark isnt here. prefer the old one? no.

These are all modern day papers, and we think about if they are baetuful and well designed. they change every day but have some consistency.

Lets see the last, here are the 70s: NYTimes, Daily Express, The Scotsman (i thought it was like 1890, its the 70s!), a 1940s The Hammond Times with rules under the heads with breaks to show which colomn goes fromt he headline. these buzz with energy as they are so packed. its a mess but its a wonderful mess and makes me want to read them all. theres a certain style in it.

What do yo guys think> exciting? mess? (dude: depends what you're used to)

Kansas City Star, 2 images when it was redoen from hot metal to offset and pasted on a board. This mean going a bit more modular and no more the ong straight lines. but the energy got lost in this process.
 
the guardian redesigned in 1988 by david pilman (?) and the USA Today redesign with color got a lot of flack 'its a comic book with all that color and the short stories', and they had the las alugh as every apepr in teh usa looks liek taht today and worldwide trend towards it

Die Presse, its lovely, but its BORING. its meant to be news, not endless reports. so lets get some criteria. this isnt fine art, its design, which means commercial art. its what sells.

modernists love straigh tlines, heres this lovely house that is bute straight lines. corbusier went a bit far with his model to wreck parid. looking at what sells, people like a english wattle and aub cottage and it looksliuke ign a medeaval feast inside.

news of the world selels 1.5 milllion copies, its a messa gna a ujumble, but its fun. its fun, engageing, organic shapes.

we like beauty, we like attractiveness, we like busyness and fun. we see a lot of jumble in the layouts of successful papers. (the average elements per page is much higher on these, which the brainerd could tell you if you deviate from)

New York Post is a real laugh,

The UK press on the 2004 reelection of bush was great - the mirroa dnt eh guardian. the guardian pulls no punches, headlines like 'a greedy, corrupt liar'.

te new guardian, theres something wonderful about the fonts, the ultralight is so beautiful.

but what actually sells? the top seller, 14million sales, yorim shimbo (?? is in japan, and japane has a high tradition of papers, 92% of households have them delivered, and designwise? hmm. they are in color, my repros just arnt though. number 2 is also japansese. this is 4.5 million.

Nice graphic of the sales.

more than hal the newspaper sold in japen are quality national newspapers. 55.7%. its 8.8% in the UK. the sun is number 4, 3.1 million. usa has 2.6 milllion. mail is 6, 2.3m. times of india has 2.1

and we are not seeing award winning design here!

wall st ojournal, 1.8m, and this is distinct and has a style, the headlines are beautfilluy done.

LA Times is 37 on the list.

Mail, is busy, colorful, stimulates the brain, and kinda distinctive.

The Sun has a VERY distinctive look with futura condensed bold. The Sun is the most big and bold, stims the brain, mkes you laugh.

the urdu one, i just like it.

Die Zeit, yeah very good.

Franffurter, yeah also pretty good.

I get the impression that being distinctive is the most important thing.

In the USA everything is new, but peopl elike thing that stay the same, its comforting. the wall st journal is so comprehensive, and WSJ is not dumbed down, its smartened up.

there is an international language of newspapers where the stories are told through the design. michael bearuits guardian design is beatuy, busy, distrincve, but its missing the huge circulation. maybe they could skew the conent (image of Jordan photoshoppped on there, hah)

1240

q&a

q: brtiian, there are few papers on the newsstands compared to all the magazines, whereas japan has home delivery. does that effect things?
a: also the commuter thing, its easy to read somethign small...

q: designers intervene with their cultural values to make things nice, vs a business need
a: we a re built to like things nice. a culdnt do a new sof the world layout, its so much jumbling. the german one is too perfec tthough, its like china you could break it., it should be rough.
q: design breaking tthat concept of beatuyt, because it works with business.

q: ???
a: in that chain there are 23millino papers gon gout. its lots of countries ,scandanavia, southa merica, but they arent in the ABC ciruclation tables.

q: central europe had papers that 20minutes has destroyed. they are nice and very glam.

final slide is a cool image of an old dinky toy newsvan from the 20s/30s)

q: does a redesign effect thigns?
a: it spikes readership and then declines slowly, in the case of the guardians latest.

q: brand lolyalty is a big factor, and the diesng reinforces that?
a: sure, maybe.
q:star, mirror and sun are designed very siimarly, but the readership is very clearly defined and people dont swap over. the guartdian appears to have changed its editorial position with this redesign, and it seems that it now has a broader editorial line, which is maybe why that spike has stayed high.
a: yeah, private eye is designed ina  strange and funny way, but who cares, its the content thats so great. we found design made no difference, if it was monday and they read a lot on sunday, or it wa raining, or there is a big story like dianas death, that effects things more than the design i think.

1250 lunch until 1400

Alan Rusbrindger - The Shrinking Broadhseet

The ditor of te Guardian. Why we did what we did. A balance, the advantags ands disaavatanges.

If you hear me slighting thc omepttion you wont take any notice, so take it all witha a pinch of salt. I truely do believe that you shouldnt pretend that its the same. there was a myth that everyone was downsizing, the editors and so on, so we siad we were just changing shape and everythign else sit the same. but its not the same, its qualitititvesly different, and not just a question of design, and i thnk we dhould be honest about this.

whats happening is startling and is real chagne.

cast our minds back to summer 2003 when everyone was broadsheet, and i include the mail along with the guardian, independent, times and telegraph. guradian -6.2m a yearh, idependsnet lost 15m, times -20m, the telegraph made 30milion, and the mail made 120million!

these are group figures not just hte dailies)

the telegraph was down from 80m a few years ealrier.

So you dont need to imagine that the conversations were going on behind closed doors. 'why are we poublsihignt his kind of paper and losing loads of money, when this slightly differnet paper is making shedloads... can we converge these markts, can we be more like the mail without sacrificiing our integrity entirely, and get some of that 120m profit our way.'

I wasnt privvy to those conversatoin, sbut if you were rupert murdoch, who is a kind of hero who has invested on the times and lost a lot of money there because he does believe in real journalism. so its a tribute that he keeps backing it.

it may have bene thoughts of those kinds though, that went behind it doing tabloid or 'compact' and dual publishing. in a city like london, people commuting does mean that reading a boradsheet is hard, and people did say they would like a serious paper a the size of a tabloid.

you have to ekeep lightlighitn the uniqness of the british press market. it is an off market compared to continental europe or the USA, where you have single paper markets. in NYC there is no competition for the New York Times. Its impossible for an editor not to think of yourself in teh context of other papers in the UK.

So how do you stand out on the newsstand? And increaitngly people have subcscrinptiosn less and less. Subs used to be 80% and now its 20%, so 80% of your sales are at tthe newsstands where people make their choice.

do you edit the front page with whats important news, or what will sell? You cant have both thoughts in your mind, you need a consistent approach. Are we going to be the 7th paper in this market, and what can we do to differentiate ourselves.

I made a diagram of the british press in may 2003, a cartesian grid with the left/right politics on the x axis and seriousness on the y axis. mirror is -1,-1, sun is 1,-1, mail 1.2, -.5, telegraph 0.5,1.1, and times 0.5,1, independent 0,1.1 ft 0.9,2 and guardian -0.5,1.5 and independent -1,1

so if you didnt get hung up with the guardian being left, we dont change our poltics but address people with an intelligent tone, and have a trust element that the internet doesnt have, then there is an intersting place where the guardian is.

a broadsheet pays attention to what stories go in what order, the front page stories are at the front because we journalists think they are impotant. you look at the times, and (imge of 'blair bares his teeth' headline with a big photo of his teeth) they are doing a kind of newsless front page. its different from any times ofthe previosu 200 years.

Then there is the Independent doing these typogrpahic front pages, where the fornt pgae is not used for news, but for effect. litk the reversed out 'the war is over, now these questiosn must be ansered' and a thick block of text of questions. and this tekqnie hsa been use over and over, might now be tired...

so they went compact, and eg the hutton report issue opens with the work 'whitewash', and its editorial on the front page not news. the white space is used very graphically for a striking front page. the pages are like the daily mail in htis repesecpt.

so we were thinking, how are we going to get into this market, are we going to do a completely blank front page after a front with 3 words on it? are we gong to keep jousting with novelty? these are hard questions for a newspaper of quality - its familiar midmarket tekniqs.

so convergence with the daily mail... there was some terrorist thing with babies let out, and every paper ran this as their front page, and the independent ran a front page about what a bad man george bush was 'byt he numbers'. i thought this was the worst page ever, but the editor stood by it and thought that newspapers cannot comeptee with the itnernet for fast changing latest stories.

this confirmed in my mind that we didnt want to go in this direction, and that you couldnt win by staying oldschool.

we tried tweaking the old 90s design, but i felt we lost the gravitas and the wit of the guardian. we went more dramatic with a colored bar masthead, and peoeplt htought that was trying to ahrd, this is abotu feb 2004, and we thoughtthis could jepordise what the guardian has become as we dont really understand or belveie in it.

so the majro problem was we didnt have a pritnigng press, or a building for one, and they are expensive and take time to build. we asked whats the fastest one could be built, it was 18 months, and this was the fastest one ever built.

the first thing that chagned was the website. if you wanted a paper with a sense of cautiona nd the old values of a broadsheet, you can look at BBC Online and such and see that kind of clear information set out well, on googlenews too. so young future readers are fine with resstrained images, they didnt need it shouted at them, and we could proceed in our restarined way.

As mark began to work on the typefaces that he thought would work best, and junk the old bold helvetica, and there were days where it was awkward.

so the last few editions fo the 90s style, we changed the style of the main headlines to a serif, and then about summer 2005 we started using the new typeface a little. and so the front page was sufficiently distinctive and it works well.

speaking your own voice and being trusty and authetintic is important today with the web.

the paper comes in sections, and the G2 is half size, and the 3rd sections are in a distinctive style, and it enabled us to do real text based pages. we didnt have to be frightened by text.

iamges of graphs of popular opinon on the change, which are 80% approval ratings and15% no change is excellent)

image of a newsstand, showing that it stands out well)

80% siad it was easier to read on public transport

images of readership from ABC data, shows it spiking when the redesign, in a contet of slowly falling readership, that really continued)

1440

q&a

q: how do you use market research and how do you balacne what the MR tells you with what you think is right for the paper?
a: it is difficult, you have to spend years behind a one way mirror as they really inslut your wonderful paper, but you listen to the tenor and composition of the group you can pick u things, and if you have a clever person who can intepert these groups, and the time and money for that, as we did, you can learn things. the panel researchging the berliner sizise, fi they were totally against it, we would have taken that on baord. beyiond that, well...

q: ..?
a: the most interesting thing going on is the internet. you can tell who is rteading what on there. you can importnat that back int othe ppritn paper. there was a stage when judy birch was writing for us,and she was outstorying hugo ... by 1000:1, so would any sane editor chose her on that? no, hes more impotant. on a week by week basis we dont do any analysis like that though.

q: how do you see the website working with the print edition?
a: All those very basic questions we asked ourslves about what we were here for, what was true and neccessary about the garuadian, are being asked again. we have the most popular news website in the uk and has been voted the best in the world the last 2 years, but we dont think we cracked it, we dont know what we and we alone can offer. those have to be the guiding question. so many people cna do better things than us, and they are the things that we used to do. but you dont think about that, you look at what you and you alone can do.

gl q: ..?
a: you can subscribe to a form you roll the mouse over and its great, its had modest takeup, and its popualr with expats abroad, and who like to see things in the order we print things.

q: hows financial things going now?
a: we are all losing much more money now. it was a big investment to build the presses, we got price waterhouse in, a 15 year plan, saving apaper, the speed of the paper, and that over 15 years it would cost the same. we use less apper and ink than we used to.

1500

in the alte 80s, All papeprsuse things in a scrappy way. the mid market tabloid use chaotic arrangement of fonts and the broadsheet make no attempt to be readable and are very text heaavy.

so in the 90s digital process and direct input by journalists was an incredibale revoltuion, tehcnical, professional and political. fast movig technoloogy, it might change the ways that appers looked. these are not isntant machines, and dong someting special meant planning it on paper and going to a guy in tehbasemenat nand waiting a few days, and thats how it used to be, and it all changed.

but in 1988 they looked the same. the independent looked differnet because it was a new paper in the 80s that was only mad possible byu the new technology. the appearnce of it doesnt refelct athat all though; partly thats marketing, a paper that wanted to look lik e it ahd been around a long time.

pdeditors also havd a fixed idea of wajt a nerwspaper was, and there hasnt been a big change in fact since the advent of halftone printing at the turn of the centuiry.

Its ahard to think how radical and shocking the 88 guardian redesign was. the mutlitiiple rules and uses of space were directly from the enw tech. but it ddidnt question the journalistic conventions.

image of a comp of a printed page and the 88 redesign. a swiss modernist appraoch to layout, helvetica in the middle of the page, but the layouts were all the same. a fresh look a and a rational way of ordering the inforamtoin was the only change.

the ystematic appraoch is needed as 20/30 peple doing differnet layouts, so it wasnt about changin tght eindustry in anywya .

But eh USA Today redeesign DID change things radically. serious papers laughed at this, and that its been very successful shows they were wrong. it was the first newspaper for th television age, and people were worried that TV woul d be the main way that people would get their news, this was a worry across the indtursty, and so this apper was meant to have some of the grpahics, some of the punch, of the TV,.

An enrommrous influence by marketting and ad agencys, short telelvison style soties that got the point across very uickly. it was all marketing people not editors and journamlists. so you could say it was the first appar taht gave people what they wanted instead of what editors though thtey should have.

The opoynter institteue in 1991 with mario garseea studyed the way readers navigagted pages (image of cool eye watcher kit) and it wasnt that suprising, people read the headline, then the main picture, and it represented a way of teaking ad/marketting tekniqs that we could be scientific about things, and not just rely on the way that editors had gut feelings.

so people had a strong argment for papers with color entry points and short stories ands uch like the USA Today. The italian edition of the metro 'mondo', is the best eample of this today. a swiss designer, its a paper for people who reject tradiional papers as boring and hard to read. its got every tekqni, color coded, multipole entry points, al lthe long next is broken up into editoable chunks, and despite all the color its not a magazine, its recognisably a newspaper.

USAToday was calleda  McNewspaper by others, but this could be even more applied to Metro. It tries ahrd to be digiestable, its a universal prodcut, and all over the world, the metro is the same. no sense that different countriues have differnt cultures that might make them want a different kind of paper.

the other thing looming isnt just TV any more, the internet had a massive impact. it moves faster than printed media, and its distrubing because newspapers with websites put all their content online and this makes a bighole in teh business plans of papers.

all over the world execs okk at graphcsigoing down, everywhere apart from japan circulations are in decline. a lot of money are facing up to the same problems, really worried about the future of their business.

in such cases, entrepenures look at some money for themselve. mario ??? is a professor at the poynter institute, and a newspaper guru. invovled with over 450 newspapers and has 10/15 projects on redesignigng papers. he has storng views about how they should be put together, and its lieka religious dogma. a charming man though, he talks to publisherrs in a langauge they understand, so hes good at getting non-change people to change.

roger black, andy palmer, lucy de..?, some poepl ein this room, about 10-15 people in the world doing thse scale projects, and accounting for 90-95% of teh enwspaper redesigns in the world. an incredable concentraiotn of powerin the workd. some are journos, some are designers, but all are post USa today poeople.

we are all thingking the same things;l people with short attention spands, other media competitoin, so our solitions are often simiarl.

mexico, scotland or india, all papers have a masthead with color and teasters as well as the mast and price. sidebrs, pull quoites, mixture of serif and sans, and those faces are froma  handful of type designers who understand the newspaper business, hoffman frerejones in NYC, the hague designers, and fontshop (?) and (?)

technogoclaiy we can do whatever we like, but editors conservativsm and poynter inst style means we have a new set of conventions that mean everyone has a classic serif typeface, a sans headline, a blue tine, some entry points. everyone has the same problems and so the same solutions.

so the ecology bcomes impoverished. a monoculture. scientists warn about virusses in monocultures. so the same thing is happening in papers.

the 180' L textbox has spread ALL OVER. (imges of the trail of this, shanme it went so fast i couldnt note it

Its not plagiarism people arent stealing ideas, but theres a real desperation for real ideas.

el Periodico was grea,t very crisp and modern, richness of the pgeas with a disciplies about how its arranged thats a real new look. but you become a victimof your own success, and now you cant tell the free airline newspaper from the sao paulo broadsheet. these guys indersatnd how to organise information and make useful flexible templates for people.

they take sloppy papers, organise them, and so present them well. but this leads to a mediocrity as it trickles down.

i was in spain recently, and there are like UK a lot of local papers, and they are all very good robustly designed papers. tey are astoundingly sophisticaed formats. but the photos are so boring, and the content is just stock, so they have no personality at all.

the spansihs call it 'the dictatorship of teh templates'.

The European Journal and The Herald had designers design them, and they were so rigid they didnt respond to the news and those papers went nowhere, so theres a warning there for having designers get too invovled.

La Presse, montreal for french speakers in quebec, its unliek anythhing else.

Zaman from turkey looks kind stock 21stC template like, but it has a little buit of auniqeu ersonality.

USA Today, today, uses Gulliver from the Hague, and so it has a weird personality. they mangled the face though, its all condensed, the leading is too small, its over condensed. but its so unconventional (compared to the conventions it started) its acutally nice.

Trouw from holland has shrunk like many others, and its the best example of a compact reloading of an intelligent tabloid. the rbought color in in a subtle wa.

El Paid never pulled it off though, and its design has NEVER changed. It looks like the times form 74, and its never changed since then. ven though theyve had advice from everryt newspaper designer in the world. but they are afraid to embrace the modern age and so its very old fashioned.
 
NYTimes also refuses to change. they clearly udnerstand design very well, a state of the art website and great magazines, but they chose to stayin the citizen cane era. chelenham typeface is so archatic, but it has a beatuy, like a 1920s car.

Frankfurter also hasnt changed, and form this mronign we saw designers love it, specially nongerman speaking ones. They never put pictures on the fron tpage, apart from Sept 12th 2001. Hardly ever use color.

Neue Burcher Beitung looks like it was designed in the 30s, but you couldnt update it withoutl osing its essnetial charachter. we were asked to make a new design, this has never been publicaly shown before, and we retained the densitu, the odd 4 cololmn grid, and this is 'the most serious paper in the world'. but they hated our redesign and didnt change.

The Indepedent, is like another off the shelf paper, maybe not so  much color, but the special front apges breath a lot of life in to it. The independent is a bit boring, environemetn bush blair... enviornemtnt.

The Mirror have a lot of practice at their covers and they work as well as ever.

small papers have a lot of attitude in brasil as there isnt a lot of ads over there, and they are incredibly inventive and suprising, and even inside are very splahy. some do very well with this.

Dagen in Norway, failed in a few months, but had very daring design. This didnt have anything to do with it, the busiens plan was poor, but it was fresh and modern, using just one spot color, and gives hope there are possiblitis unexplored.

DeMorden was a  garcia project, and another small circlautaotni newspaper that has to make a spaslh tow survive. theres oemthgins clever about it, its all markets at once, and this is good for post internet readers. good use of color, editing and design is well coordinated. more hpoe for the future

There will be more people taking more chances and not following a stnadard newspaper tempalte.

What about hte Uk? A lot of people are in love with fleet st and a kinda cult of uglyness.

Why use Avante Garde, the worse newspaper headline font ever? Compare the sun with Blick or Bild from the contient that use much nicer clean modernist type.

Why is british papers so obsessed with bad design> The mail isn no different from the mid 80s. The layouts are very very crude. The mail considers this good old fashioned editor driven design, but it just looks bad to me.

image of a editorial comment colomn) It could be straight out of the 50s! The argument is that, being so traditional, its very successful, and thats the point afterll, to sell, and this sells.

Finally, my new guardian design. Part of it was to recapture the spitir of broadsheet journalism. it was meant ot have a flavour of frankfurter, and we tried to avoid all the sstand mdoern tekniqs. its driven by pictures not typogrpahy. its lighter than any other headline type certainly in this country. its tradiional but modern at the sam tiem. we avoided the sans/serif mix by having a wide range of weights. we havesh ort items and entry points but we try to do it differnetly.

Its seirous, its not a mcnewspaper. we make more use of ullustation than normal, and make use of white space which is also unsualy. We make a lot of great photos taht are full bleed, because we have a new press that hsa great print quaity.

We can do big big things (image of 'America's lOng war' with a deatiled globe map infographic. And we can also do things that are a lot like the Sunday Times Magfaazine spead.

And so this is, IMO, the strongest example of why where are new possibilities for newspapers today.

1545 break 10 1550

Nimrod monotype in 1980 was the old one.

the 88 redisign used Helvetica, Garamind and Nimrod.

Hillman took trends from the 80s and recycled them.

New Order album form 1985 was the reemergence of the swiss modern style.

Hillman siad "the garamodn signals stylish efeatures and helveteic hard news'.

In the 1999 a gentle tweak was made. We concluded that Helvetica was part of the brand of the guardian.

Went from Helv 1957 to Neue Helv from 1983

Garamond went to Matt Carters Miller, 1994 after early 19thC

and Nimrod went to a specially commissioned face

In 2003 I was appraoched for a redesign. This was done with a new typeface, Gulliver, and that was used solely apart from in the masthead. I thought it was interesting but didnt wquite work. And we wanted a better helvetica.

I never likedd the neue helv, I liked the classical one as it had a rounder feel. It was a metal face with optical scaling, wheras Neue was for all sizez. The lowercase a, compre them, the old school is much nicer.

We asked Christian Schwatz tomake a new Helvetica, over christmas on a short 2 month project. He interpolated the medium from the light and heavy, and 'Guardian Grot' was its name. It set tightly for headlines, and it had a special italic. the a and u and f had tails.

We asked Jonathan Hoefler for a new version of Mercuy, although the Observer has since taken up this font so were glad we didnt.

In early 2004 the tabloid format was abandonde,d, and changed to the berliner.

Christian and I eventually came up with Hacienda, which replaced Helv in the headlines, and it had the same basic proportions. We tested it against New Miller so that it was the same word density - the worst thing you can say to an edtor is theres now less text.

But by August we decided it wasn't quite right, Helvetica was still the identity of the Guardian. Mark wanted ato mke one last attempt to create a new sans, a Helvetica for the 21st Century.

Theres a myth that the early sans serif were derived from the egyptians. So what happens if I make an egryptian version of hacienda, then cut off the slabs.

We did develop it right through to a sans serif version, and both could work together. The Egyptian had a nice mix etween a sans ans s serif, the light could be as delicate as a serif, and the heavy could work as well as a sans. In august when we finished the headline egyptian, we knew where we were going, and hd had discussinos baout the spacing. Linign figures, old style figuress, fractions, ligatures, the weights. it was all plain sailing until we came to the italics.

We had a light and friendly disagreement. The sans was okay, but the Egyptian was harder. I liked the old 19thC stuff, but mark liked the old granjon italics with more interesting things going on. he couldnt work out how to fit them together. verion 18 was the final one, and that shows much much thigns went into it.

We thought of them more as cousins than brother and sister. You rarely see them on the same line so they can afford to be different.

IN the magazines, perhaps they'll use all the weights we designed.

We made a differnet titling and reading faces, the italic reading face is more more regular.

The presses were also being built while we were designing. The german press was simialr, the reading one had more time, and we made 4 grades for the 4 different press conditions that were out there. 4 version that got bolder bu had the same kerning so they were the same layout.

We also made smallcaps.

It was more economical than New Miller, which made the editors happy.

We even made a tiny version, flatter sides, inktraps, slightly condesnsed, and this is used for sports results, finaincnial pages, and a large time spend on the fractions and percentages. they have to fit on the same body so they can be alinged in tables. including currency signs are basic math glyphs

the agate then influenced the text face slighly, the l got a tail back.

We went to flat slabs instead of angled slab serifs, for the magazine, which often set things in all caps.

And a homage to Herb Lubalin and 19th Century type.


In all, there are 80 new fonts, over 200 variant,t the largest set ever comissioned for a paper, and we use Quark 3.31 stiill. (WHAT THE FUCK)

1615

q&a

q: how was it wrking in a pair?
christian: i used to work at font beaura in boston, where a designer would design it, and then a production person would draw the bold and the accents and such. 2 people cannot fully collaborate on teh design is a belief there, and we awnted to see if it could work afterall. it was a lot of fun on the pohone, sending font files back and forth. we'd be on the phone and ichat all at once, and work out all the details and larger issues this way.
paul: we spend a lot of time talking to eachother, filtering the inforation through, and there was a 3 way relationship really between us and mark.
christian: our ideas to each other clarifyied what we were thinking.
paul: different strenghts betwen us too. pointless trying us to interpolate 16 differnet fonts when chrfistian can do it in 20 mins.
christian: simialr he knew the culture of the guardian better, and has a graphic design background where as mine is as typeface designer.
paul: its funto see  your creation out there. we havent changed an ything since the launch. i don thtink theres now anything to change.
Chrisian: maybe some curves would be done differently, but the main design stands.

1626

Nico Macdonald - Design, the neglected discipline in news online

The headline might seem like a slap in the face.

Ive gone from law to IT to design strategy to journalism to business constulting. I know a lot about type, but im not a designer.

So, I wanted to alk about the way design for the internet is as importnat as design for TV and newspapers. But they are tending to merge. Guardian now does podcasts, for example. Confluence is significant here. Its not just interaction design onilne, its everything that accompanies broadcast media.

Graphic design and the web: David Gelernter, 'space is newsprints domain; time is the webs' (famous usa compsci guy) as webpages have a lot of depth, and user interaction and traidional moving images exist in time.

Poyner did an ehbition 'communicate' at te barbican a couple of years ago. the web is pages i nnewspaper design. while it might seem appropriate atm, this is changing. this is not the future metaphor for the web, but right now it is.

roger black, jessica helford, both worked on discovery.com in 1994, and she said she taught roger black everything she knkows, and hes a sharp businessman.

My notes will be online by the way.

New news: readers are changing, and theyh dont see things as designers see them. blogging, suer generated content, youll hear all about this in the coming months. a photo from the 60s, all people reading papers in the tube, a photo today with ipods, laptopa and palmtops.

the web works in a way that changes the way people see things, and designers find this very shcooking, and designers like thigns like flash because it gives them comfort against that.

For example, usabiltynews.com has imges of it in safari, in a newsreader, and then on a mobile screen. 3 views of the same data and same publication. its very dfifferent.

NetNewWire means the different news providers have literally zero differentation visually. Im not saying everyone does this, not everyone does htis. But its on the rise. Yahoo is a big media player in the USA now, and MyYahoo allows personalisation of its front page that works in the same way.

Googel Earth, the worlds worst designed applicaiiton, only engineers could design that - but its a phenomenal bit of software. BBC Backstage makes BBC data available to developers, and a 'mashup' means you can see BBC news in its geographical context. Again, a different way of seeing news.

Then theres the Sony Reader. eBooks have been tuted a the next big thing foever. Again, another way of seeing news.

The New York Times Reader is coming with the next version of MS Windows Vista, and it will display things in a way that designers might like, that displays text in cololmns.

Emails are designed, very badly, and that's a design challenge that designers need to think about.

GoogleNews brings together in a hacked kinda way lots of different news sources, allows localisation.

And then things are debated endlessly in blogs.

Design comes a poor second the editorial, online.

"The role of design on FT.com is 'to implement what they want' doing look and feel around showcasing elements sections of the site and to 'make it look attractive and as interesting as possbile'. "

"newspaper and web are differnet tiiteer, differne stkilslet, ..."

"it hels if there is a wing of the management team that will do wthings differnent;y"

"NYTimes actively seought out our involvement" sasys Khoi Vinh, Design Directory, NYTimes.com - "when we sat at the table we were all equals"

"Newspapers are there to make money for the peopel who wown them. we are lucky to have jobs" - peter baistow - you need to justify everything.

But I think design has a critical role to play in whatever it is we are creating. the firs tgeneration of whatever it is, is always pretty unusable.  UK tabloids are a bit scary for design, but we can get on and use them.  

dig.com, craigslist. i metnioed this at a talk aat the RSA. Criashstlis is craigslist, (only me and one other person put up their hand recognisign this. Digg, ONLY I KNEW OF THIS? WTF)

Digg is an interesting way of seeing news because you can comment. These are terribly designed because they dont scale.

Recommendations have a lot of things to explore still, and digg doesnt go far enough, and if the eastalished opublications can get their heads around this first, they have a future.

Editorial Grpahic Design is something we all undersatnd in this room. Interaciton design sis still not a natural skill, and has been a chanllenge for graphic design. but graphic design oculd be a key insporation for future networked media.

I really think that graphic design holds the key to understanding interaction design. Like, knowing how to work with clients and suppliers.

HOw graphic designers deal with things; "when evaluating the procucts and serviecs we should ask: was the users experience successful and satifying?" - Lauralee Alben We shoulnt discuss things in terms of the layout of the tyep per se, but in terms by Laurlee Alben like this. "If a product is designed to do something, and people can do it, its usable. If its fun or pleasureable, its satisfying. Together thans a good user experience" she said.

When you think about using your phones or email or skyplus box or your pc, you can ask if it was a good user experience.

Interaction design: websites are software with conent. Its the best term I kjnow to describe design of software with conetn. When something is intelligent, when it changes state affter thigns youdo.

The Internaitonal Herald Tribune has an 'article tool' that allows you to swtich to a colomn based layout. And it has clippings, so you can bookmark sites withint the site itself. its very elegant and subtle, but it means ist a more satisfying an pleasirable site.

The other thing is about userstanding people who use your product. I think graphic designers do boradly undestand their users better than onlien designers. user research, not just on the users but also the maintainers and users, is importnat.

Graphic designers are easily intimidated by the web. people who are broadly eduated, undersatnd business models and engineering, but also know their own thing.

My book 'What is web design?' I have a proces diagram.

Interactive media mean that you can compare things, BBC website has somethings like this so you can compare GDP with foreign holidays. This is visualisation.

Cross platofrm use, the wall street jouranl says 'ther perfect website is one that you can have in teh aplm of your hand'.

How can I see a story on the guardian newspaper and email it to my friend? i have to search ou the article and email the url. (mailed nic that cool screenshot tool)

Systems design, meta stuff, is really needed for all ths stuff.

When I hit an old bookmark to the guardian website, I got a 'bad gateway' error message certainly no designed by anyone at the guardian.

Wall St Jouranl survey said 'your reportres pull up all kinds of facts that dont go into the final articles, these should go into wikipedia'.

There are big classic challenges of the web - communities, i18n and l10n, advertising and marketting, dealign with greater expression, and accessiblity issues.

The slides will be online at www.spy.co.uk/Talks/NewspaperDesignDay

1705

q&a

q: Engineering is more respected than design atm in the interaction indusry. its a people sklls thing, wheni was at art school there was no coverage of business.
a: yeah, you need to be more broadbassd than ever. designers talk about ethics and such a lot today, which is hard to do at a college. designers think engineers are propeller heads and this is ironic as its about being empathic to your users and also your collaborators. design has this metaskill traditionally; we dont ooften think about designing the skill or process as well as the product. the RCA has an itneraction design program to retrain desigenrs as industrial designers as an approach to this.

q:..?
a: we think linear text is the future of the 21stC, but htis is a 14thC technology. designers know how to do this stuff. visualisation is one way into it, recommendations is another way. In newer version of Windows, theres 100s of options on a menu, but they are hidden and only the ones you use stay around. And I have 20 people I really trust to read their blogs.

q: tension between your wish for collaboration and that designers who are good are good because they hve a good ego, adn they ar the experts in their studio, and its not that collaborative, its leadership. so will they find it hard to react?
a:  design is the poor cousin compared to engineering and content production, and that leadership confiendce is another way of succeeding, perhaps

q: web design is more like product design than graphic design, less self expression
a: sure. expressing your politics in your design is as far away from making great things for other people as you can get. im pleased to see lots of people who are really interested in this other approach, there are really two classes of designers, self expressers and those who want to make a difference in the world.

1725

Some people are going to the pub, the old bell.

Thanks to all the speakers, and st brides library again!