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The New York Times
The New York Times nameplate
The Gothic, or blackletter, name on the front page goes back to founder Henry Jarvis Raymond, and it has been refined rather than replaced ever since. Its best-known revision took effect in February 1967, when promotion art director Lou Silverstein redrew it on tracing paper and hired lettering artist Ed Benguiat to do the final ink drawing. Silverstein also dropped the period after Times, which had been part of the name for more than a century; he recalled the production manager working out that losing it would save about $600 a year in ink. Compare an old front page with today's to see how much a revered mark can change while still looking the same.
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Cheltenham (typeface)
Cheltenham was drawn in the 1890s by the architect Bertram Goodhue for Ingalls Kimball's Cheltenham Press, and it was built on a theory of reading. Goodhue lengthened the ascenders and shortened the descenders, betting that the top half of a line does most of the work when the eye recognizes words. The New York Times took it up for headlines in 1906, and in 2003 art director Tom Bodkin commissioned Matthew Carter to rework it into Times Cheltenham, a family the paper owns. That is why a bold, slightly old-fashioned Cheltenham headline now reads as unmistakably Times, even online.
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Legibility Group
Ionic No. 5, Linotype, 1925
The first of Linotype's Legibility Group, developed in-house under Chauncey H. Griffith for newspaper text set on hot metal machines. It avoided fine lines and serifs that would break down in stereotyping, and small openings that would fill with ink, so it stayed legible at small sizes on the harsh presses of the day. It was an immediate success: in less than 18 months nearly 3,000 newspapers around the world were using it. The tall x-height that made it so readable had a cost, since it widened the lowercase and blurred the difference between n and h. Later members such as Excelsior and Corona refined the formula, and Monotype has revived Ionic No. 5 for designers who want that sturdy newsprint voice.
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Times New Roman
The most famous newspaper typeface began as a complaint. Stanley Morison, artistic adviser to the British branch of Monotype, criticized the look of The Times and was invited to do something about it; the result made its debut in the paper on October 3, 1932. Morison proposed Monotype's older Plantin as the basis, and the main change was sharper contrast between thick and thin strokes for a crisper image. Credit is genuinely disputed: Morison worked with Victor Lardent, a lettering artist in the paper's advertising department, and although he may not have drawn it himself, Morison called it his one effort at designing a font. Released for general sale, it became Monotype's best-selling metal type of all time.
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Gerard Unger
Born
Swift, Gerard Unger, 1985
The Dutch designer Gerard Unger first drew Swift in the early 1980s for Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell, the German typesetting company whose clients around the world included many newspapers. Its giant serifs and pronounced shapes were meant to make it close to indestructible in the rough world of newspaper printing, and Unger named it after the bird for being compact, efficient, quick and elegant. It brought a breath of fresh air to 1980s newspaper design, and it now turns up in books, advertising and corporate identities too; the sample here is its later revision, Neue Swift. Unger kept going: his Gulliver set USA Today and the Stuttgarter Zeitung, and Coranto went to The Scotsman.
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The Guardian
The Guardian masthead by David Hillman, 1988
For the paper's February 1988 redesign, Pentagram partner David Hillman set The in Garamond italic and Guardian in Helvetica bold: a light, slanted serif leaning against a heavy sans, which looked startlingly modern on a British broadsheet. Readers did not agree at first, sending more than a thousand letters within days, most of them negative. Opinion turned, and the redesign is often called the most important newspaper redesign of the 20th century. The mark survived until the 2005 Berliner relaunch, when critics complained the new lowercase masthead was no match for Hillman's classic.
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Le Monde
Le Monde Journal by Jean François Porchez, 1994
This one started unsolicited. In April 1994 Porchez read an article by Le Monde's new editor-in-chief, Jean-Marie Colombani, announcing a redesign, and decided the paper needed a new typeface. In July he wrote to propose one: a drastic reworking of Times New Roman, the paper's face at the time, made for the French language and for newspaper text at small sizes. The deal was as clever as the letters. French copyright stays with the designer, so on advice Porchez offered a discounted price for a limited exclusivity period and kept the right to publish the face himself. Le Monde Journal is now sold commercially, alongside its sans companion, Le Monde Sans.
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Retina (typeface)
The Wall Street Journal's stock tables were the problem: thousands of tiny figures printed on newsprint. Tobias Frere-Jones answered with Retina, created in 2000 in a MicroPlus size for composing tiny yet readable listings. Its MicroPlus weights have deep-cut notches that absorb ink in print, and each letter keeps the same width in every weight, so a column can change emphasis without resetting its tab stops. MoMA acquired it in 2011 as one of 23 digital fonts in its permanent collection, and after years of further work it was released to the public on October 5, 2016, a rare honor for type nobody was supposed to notice.
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Guardian Egyptian
When The Guardian became the first British title to adopt the smaller European Berliner page in September 2005, creative director Mark Porter commissioned Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz to draw a whole new family for it. Guardian Egyptian's biggest influence was the slab serif Egyptians cast by London foundries in the mid-19th century, and it quickly emerged as the favorite for both headlines and text, as well as setting the new lowercase masthead. It stayed in the masthead until 2018. Look at the headline weights to see how much variety one slab design can carry, and compare it with Hillman's Helvetica nameplate that it replaced.
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The Times
Times Modern, 2006
The paper that gave the world Times New Roman eventually decided its headlines needed something sharper. For a 2006 redesign, a typeface project led by deputy editor Ben Preston with Neville Brody's Research Studios produced Times Modern, with Brody's colleague Luke Prowse also designing the masthead. Its pinched proportions, Brody said, allow more copy in a headline without compromising legibility, which suited a compact paper. Times Classic, introduced in 2002, stayed in the body text. Monotype later extended the family with a wide range of display weights and added italics, which makes it a neat way to see how the Times look evolved after Morison.
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Público (Portugal)
Publico by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, 2007
Publico is the Guardian project's sibling. While drawing what became Guardian Egyptian, Barnes and Schwartz began a serif family called Haçienda, then set it aside when it no longer suited the Guardian. In summer 2006 Mark Porter and Esterson Associates, redesigning the Portuguese daily Público for an early 2007 launch, asked them to revisit it, and it was reworked and renamed, since a Spanish name did not suit a Portuguese paper. Kai Bernau and Ross Milne assisted. Now licensed by Commercial Type, it is a good example of how a rejected draft can find the right paper.
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