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News design is the process of arranging material on a
newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports a ...
page, according to editorial and graphical guidelines and goals. Main editorial goals include the ordering of news stories by order of importance, while graphical considerations include readability and balanced, unobtrusive incorporation of
advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...
. News design incorporates principles of
graphic design Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdiscipli ...
and is taught as part of
journalism Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (profes ...
training in schools and colleges. Overlapping and related terms include
layout Layout may refer to: * Page layout, the arrangement of visual elements on a page ** Comprehensive layout (comp), a proposed page layout presented by a designer to their client * Layout (computing), the process of calculating the position of obj ...
, makeup (formerly
paste up Paste is a term for any very thick viscous fluid. It may refer to: Science and technology * Adhesive or paste ** Wallpaper paste ** Wheatpaste, A liquid adhesive made from vegetable starch and water * Paste (rheology), a substance that behaves ...
) and
pagination Pagination, also known as paging, is the process of dividing a document into discrete page (paper), pages, either electronic pages or printed pages. In reference to books produced without a computer, pagination can mean the consecutive page num ...
. The era of modern newspapers begins in the mid-nineteenth century, with the
Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
, and increased capacities for
printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ea ...
and
distribution Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations * Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a vari ...
. Over time, improvements in printing technology, graphical design, and editorial standards have led to changes and improvements in the look and readability of newspapers. Nineteenth-century newspapers were often densely packed with type, often arranged vertically, with multiple headlines for each article. A number of the same technological limitations persisted until the advent of digital
typesetting Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or ''glyphs'' in digital systems representing ''characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random Ho ...
and
pagination Pagination, also known as paging, is the process of dividing a document into discrete page (paper), pages, either electronic pages or printed pages. In reference to books produced without a computer, pagination can mean the consecutive page num ...
in late 20th century.


Process

Designers typically use
desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
to arrange the elements on the pages directly. In the past, before digital pre-press pagination, designers used precise "lay out dummies" to direct the exact layout of elements for each page. A complete layout dummy was required for designating proper column widths by which a
typesetter Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical ''type'' (or ''sort'') in mechanical systems or '' glyphs'' in digital systems representing '' characters'' (letters and other symbols).Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random ...
would set type, and arrange columns of text. Layout also required the calculation of lengths of copy (text in "
column inch A column inch was the standard measurement of the amount of content in published works that use multiple columns per page. A column inch is a unit of space one column wide by high. A newspaper page Newspaper pages are laid out on a grid that con ...
es"), for any chosen width. Much of the variance and incoherence of early newspapers was because last minute corrections were exclusively handled by typesetters. With photographic printing process, typesetting gave way to paste-up, whereby columns of type were printed by machines ( phototypesetters) on high-resolution film for paste-up on photographed final prints. These prints in turn were "shot to negative" with a large format production camera —directly to steel-
emulsion An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Althoug ...
photographic plates. Though paste-up put an end to cumbersome typesetting, this still required planned layouts and set column widths. Photographic plates are (still) wrapped on printing drums to directly apply ink to
newsprint Newsprint is a low-cost, non-archival paper consisting mainly of wood pulp and most commonly used to print newspapers and other publications and advertising material. Invented in 1844 by Charles Fenerty of Nova Scotia, Canada, it usually has an ...
(paper). In the mid-1990s, the paste-up process gave way to the
direct to plate Computer-to-plate (CTP) is an imaging technology used in modern printing processes. In this technology, an image created in a Desktop Publishing (DTP) application is output directly to a printing plate. This compares with the older technology, c ...
process, where computer-paginated files were optically transmitted directly to the photographic plate. Replacing several in-between steps in newspaper production, direct to plate pagination allowed for much more flexibility and precision than before. Designers today still used column grid layouts only with layout software, such as Adobe InDesign or Quark.


Design options

Designers choose photo sizes and headline sizes (both the size of the letters and how much space the headline will take). They may decide what articles will go on which pages, and where on the page, alone or in consultation with editors. They may choose
typefaces A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...
for special pages, but newspapers usually have a design style that determines most routine uses.


Notable news designers

John E. Allen in ''Linotype News'' of the 1930s was the first to write extensively about the design of the U.S. press, followed at mid century by Syracuse journalism professor
Edmund Arnold Edmund C. Arnold (June 25, 1913 – February 2, 2007) was a newspaper designer, considered by many to be the father of modern newspaper design. As a newspaper consultant, he designed more than a thousand newspapers including ''The Boston Globe'' ...
, sometimes identified as the father of "modern" newspaper design, and journalist Harold Evans played a key role in British news design later in the century.K.G. Barnhurst, ''Seeing the Newspaper'' (1994).


See also

*
Society for News Design The Society for News Design (SND), formerly known as the Society of Newspaper Design, is an international organization for professionals working in the news sector of the media industry, specifically those involved with graphic design, illustration ...
*
Photo caption Photo captions, also known as cutlines, are a few lines of text used to explain and elaborate on published photographs. In some cases captions and cutlines are distinguished, where the caption is a short (usually one-line) title/explanation for the ...
*
Page layout In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives. The high-level page layout involves deciding on the ov ...


References

* Barnhurst, Kevin G. ''Seeing the Newspaper'' (1994) * Harrower, Tim ''The Newspaper Designer's Handbook'' (2007)
www.newspaperdesign.in


External links

* {{Journalism Copy editing Graphic design Visual journalism