A type for
all seasons

By Tony Sutton

One of the finest pieces of typographic advice I received as a young journalist came from Walter Partridge, an eminent British newspaperman of the early 1960s, who said immaculate spacing was far more important than the actual typeface used for newspaper headlines.

Thirty years ago, as the days of hot metal drew to their close, that statement was eloquent, enlightening and almost inarguable.

But I doubt if Partridge or his successors could make that claim today without massive qualification, not after meeting some of today’s editors, the worse of whom, I swear, believe that Hobo and Palatino are a good headline mix for news pages!

Overall typographic standards have plummeted since the newspaper industry’s hot metal dinosaurs - the Linotype, Intertype and Ludlow typecasting machines - were eliminated by photosetting, a thankfully short-lived intermediate trend that was, in its turn, crushed in the mad stampede toward our high-tech digital PostScript era.

But the technical revolution that gave late 20th-century designers a freedom over which our predecessors could only drool has spawned a monster: some of the most appalling typography ever inflicted on newspaper readers. This trend toward the use of unsuitable typefaces shamelessly squeezed, squished, distorted and embellished has been colorfully and all too correctly described as “Genghis Khan” typography.

It seems the newspaper industry has become overwhelmed and paralyzed by the sheer number of typefaces available. Or maybe our problems are being created by cost-strapped newspaper managers who cannot understand why they should be expected to cough up the cash to augment the ragbag range of fonts resident on their brand-new imagesetters.

That range is usually a feverishly eclectic mixture that manufacturers suggest will enable anyone to produce almost anything - a claim that should contain the rider “so long as they don’t mind it being dull, bland and unadventurous.”

Note the stress on those last words. They pretty much describes the state of headline typography in North American newspapers today. Yes, there are probably 200 or so papers that have attained typographic competence over the past few years. But that still leaves well over 1,000 dailies still flailing about in the typographic dark ages - and they constitute a very dull majority.

One reasons is that a century of typographic knowledge has been virtually erased by a generation of ignorance. In hindsight, it’s easy to see what went wrong.

For those of us typographically inclined newspaper people who grew up under the rigid constraints of hot metal and struggled with the unwieldy and often bizarre photosetting devices that followed, PostScript was the culmination of a dream - the opportunity to use any typeface we thought suitable, in any size or proportion that we wished, on the typesetting system of our choice.

For other professionals in our business, however, the dreams were never the same. Overworked and under-disciplined editors, for example, love modern technology because, finally, it has given them dominance - they have the power to club type into submission, on deadline, so that hastily written headlines will fit into spaces that previous technology would have rejected with mechanical scorn. It works, but it does not create effective typographic communication.

And we’ve all met, or heard tales of, publishers who will argue until their dying breath that the 100 fonts in the imagesetter’s memory are enough for everyone, including that loud-mouthed nerd in the editorial department who won’t stop bleating that Palatino is too weak for news display and Hobo is rarely the ideal choice as a header for the main feature on the lifestyle front. Ignorance was never more blissful. One hundred fonts, of course, are fine. But only if they’re the right 100 fonts.

What to do? Perhaps we could improve our lot by creating a universal definition of the role of good headline typography in newspapers. Herbert Spencer, another British typographer, came close when he wrote in his book, The Visible Word, “No matter how great the author’s wisdom or how vital the message or how remarkable the printer’s skill, unread type is merely a lot of paper and a little ink. The true economics of printing must be measured by how much is read and understood and not by how much is produced.”

The magic word “economics” could be the key. Type has never been cheaper or more plentiful. Yet, paradoxically, it has never been more difficult to buy the right typefaces. Life was definitely easier in those distant days of hot metal typography - because of, rather than despite, the enormous limitations of choice. If your heads were set, as most were, on a Ludlow linecaster, you bought your fonts from one of that company’s dealers. Here’s a reconstruction of a typical buying scenario in almost any year from the ’40s to the early ’60s:

Customer: I need a powerful headline font in point sizes from 24pt to 84pt.

Vendor: No problem, sir.

Customer: With a variety of weights from Medium to Extra Bold with Bold Condensed for display heads and Expanded for features.
Vendor: That limits us just a bit, sir. Sans or serif?

Customer: Serif.

Vendor: Well, we’ve got Century, Caslon, Bodoni, Times Roman and Cheltenham. If you need a contrasting sans, we can give you Tempo, Franklin Gothic or Record Gothic. For feature display, perhaps we could recommend Radiant or Karnak, a nice Egyptian face.

And that pretty much was that. Linotype could offer a few other alternatives, especially in the sans department, where Erbar and Metro were among their most popular faces, but the customer would be expected to choose from a dozen, rather than a thousand, font families; and that decision would almost certainly be narrowed further by a desire not to duplicate the fonts used in the composing room of the competing newspaper across town.

Let’s look at some of those names again.

Century. Caslon. Bodoni. Times Roman. Cheltenham.

Caslon has been around for 300 years; Bodoni for nearly 200. Century, designed by Linn Boyd Benton and developed into a huge range by his son Morris F. Benton for the giant ATF foundry, has been popular for 100 years. Bertram Goodhue’s Cheltenham dates to the turn of the century, while Times New Roman was developed by Stanley Morrison for The Times of London as a text and headline face 60 years ago, although its roots - in Plantin - go back several hundred years.

These faces, with the possible exception of Cheltenham, whose recent newspaper history has been shaky, are the true newspaper classics. They are still the newspaper industry’s bread and butter choices after almost a century in the firing line, despite a flood of upstart PostScript challengers, many of which are revivals of other classic faces, like Gill Sans, Goudy Old Style and Berkeley Old Style (ITC’s reworking of Fred Goudy’s Californian Old Style).

They are classics because they have stood the test of the marketplace. They work. So customers buy them. And, because customers keep buying them, type designers will continue to develop stylistic variations, which keeps them fresh and up to date. A Virtuous Circle of Typography, you might say.

Take Century, for example. Although dozens of variants are already available (like Century Schoolbook, ITC Century , Century Expanded, Century Old Style, Century Nova and on and on and on), there’s always room for more. So look for Bitstream’s Century 725, Matthew Carter’s contemporary redrafting of Madison for the Boston Globe. It has become one of the newspaper industry’s favorite modern variants of this typeface; as will Millennium, from David Berlow of the Font Bureau, which is set to debut later this year in the Baltimore (Md.) Sun.

Bodoni is another star that refuses to wane. The 1926 cut by the German Bauer foundry is probably the most elegant derivative on the market, but the choice has been recently augmented by another major reworking by the New York-based ITC. Bodoni’s strong contrast of thick and thin strokes is evident also in Fenice (drawn 15 years ago by Italian designer Aldo Novarese), a face that has become a popular contemporary newspaper favorite. Centennial, developed for the 100th anniversary of Linotype a few years ago, has many of the elements of the classic face with added refinements, including a wide variety of weights and the addition of the larger x-height that makes newspaper headlines easier to read.

Caslon, when compared to the success of these other faces, has been in danger of serious neglect, its newspaper appearances being most noticeable in the quirky, self-conscious ITC Caslon 224. But a recent updating of Ludlow’s powerful Caslon Bold Condensed and Extra Condensed by the Font Bureau and Matthew Carter’s new headline-weight face, Big Caslon should see its popularity and use increase rapidly.

Surprisingly, the sans classics don’t seem to have fared as well as their serifed brothers. Franklin Gothic, another M. F. Benton design, is the exception, currently enjoying a great deal of success, both in its original cuts and in the marvellous series of reworkings by Tony Stan and David Berlow for ITC. But Erbar, Metroblack and Tempo have all but disappeared, crushed a generation ago by the overwhelming, steamrolling success of Helvetica.

New sans challengers include the Font Bureau’s many-weighted Bureau Grotesque, a superb revival and extension of the classic Stephenson Blake range of grotesques, and new entries such as Sumner Stone’s Stone Sans and Adrian Frutiger’s self-named Frutiger. And, of course, Helvetica is still the world’s number one sans face, although there are a few newspaper people around who would like to see certain weights of it disappear in a puff of smoke.

Faced with an overabundance of choices, today’s newspaper designers, editors and publishers could do far worse than begin their quest for typographic identity by taking a fresh look at these classic faces. But they must do more: There is a need to open up wide-ranging discussions on the place and role of good typography, for text as well as headlines, in the modern newspaper.

How better to end than with some common sense from Ed Arnold, grandfather of newspaper design in North America, who, in explaining the need for constant innovation in newspaper design, said in 1963:

“We should ask of every individual piece of typographic content in our newspaper two questions. The first question: Does this element do a good job? If it does not do a good job, throw it out and throw it out fast. We throw it out for two reasons: We cannot afford to dissipate the energy or the time or the attention of our readers on anything that does not inform them.

“Question two: If this element does a good job, is there a way of doing this faster or easier or better?”

Our job is to develop more of those questions - then find the correct answers.

First published in Design magazine