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Chapter 6 (part 3)

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The organization of news pages also responded to an increase in the cultural value placed on clarity and order.

 

The protomodrenism (first world war) gave to the newspaper a single typeface for headlines,combining upper and laver case letters,giving typographic symplicity.

 

The classic current looked back,at The Victorian era..

The visual arts:modern abstractionists sought classical clarity in the pure form.For the news,the most suitable form became the rectangle.

 

In the High modern phases,the dislocations of the Vietnam era made only slow inroads into the world of the newspaper.The first page had a larger display type and dominant images,often in the colour.The images from the next pages were in balck and white,only the advertisments were in colors.

 

The late modern newspaper became a designer's newspaper,the stories were planned with visual packaging in mind .

 

OLD HABITS OF THE VICTORIAN NEWSPAPER:

-> an increased typographic contrast

-> a higher story count-too much text

-> maps and informational graphics

-> a smaller scale overall for pictures and other elements.

 

 

EACH NEWSPAPER MUST CONTAIN:

-six columns

-modular layout

-a small story count

-2 or 3 page illustrations

-the headlines written in sans serif

 

The Web has fostered an explosion of new ideas about information design -- the art of arranging text, graphics, and data to make reading more pleasurable or advertising more diverting.

 

Tv and radio,the visual media, constitute the highest concurence for the newspaper.At the new elements of technology,newspaper responded by moving to imitate,opemning themselves to changes in the visual form:the modular layout.

The visual and the textual presentation of news demanded order,hierarchy and usability.

 

 

The professional newspaper gave way to the manager's nespaper.

 

The COOKIE CUTTER effect is a tool to stamp out cookie dough in a particular shape. A cookie cutter solution is a solution to a problem that can be applied in many situations without modification, and the phrase is often used pejoratively due to its connotation of "unimaginative" or "simplistic".

The cookie cutter effect emerged from the growth of newspaper chains and the centralizing of design control at corporate headquarters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phases of modernism

Our findings support the notion of conspicuous design change in the 1970s and 1980s, although clearly the term revolution overstated a shift underway for a long time. The pattern of change might be summarized thus: Sometime in the World War I era, the newspaper front page became open to new design ideas; sometime between 1955 and 1965, these new design ideas began to dominate the front page. Newspapers adopted all of the specific forms that commentators have associated with the rise of modern design: fewer columns, fewer items, more prominent illustrations, horizontal layout, and simplified headline typography. The shift occurred gradually, but an acceleration in the final ten-year period of our study contributed to the widespread conception of a revolution.

 

Our survey of front page design change suggested the need for a closer analysis of the phases in the course of modern newspaper design. Clearly, modernism in newspapers reached an apex in the twentieth century, not only in circulation and influence, but also in the visual landscape. The collages of Cubism incorporated everyday articles on a ground of newsprint, thus not only associating the newspaper with modern art but also identifying the press as the substrate of contemporary life. Although the newspaper in novels, television, and film became fixed as an icon, with the modern look of a 1930s daily, newspapers people read every day changed incrementally over the century.

 

Our analysis of the twentieth century identified several phases in the emergence of the modern movement in newspaper design. The earliest modifications began to align newspapers with the changing styles in the fine and applied arts. Shifts in industrial organization based on notions of efficiency and a redefinition of citizens as consumers contributed further design expressions. The organization of news pages also responded to an increase in the cultural value placed on clarity and order.

Protomodern Phase (1910s - present)

 

In the larger cultural history of the United States, the first World War produced a climactic shift in expectations. A generation of progressive reform had encouraged thinkers to embrace the hopeful belief that continued (quantitative) development of production would lead to (qualitative) moral and political improvements, that democracy would be realized as systems of manufacture freed people from drudgery and systems of education freed people from ignorance. World War I showed that increases in productive capacity could translate directly into increased destructive capacity. The war proved not just bloody but also stupid. To this day historians can give no reasonable explanation for its origins, beyond the platitudinous: Shit happens in the Balkans.

 

The stupidity of the war did not, however, emanate merely out of passivity. All the major players were also complicit in actively producing stupidity. The United States first felt one barrage of propaganda from European countries and then another produced domestically, as the Wilson administration's Committee on Public Information cranked up a pan-media artillery. Critics could only conclude, with Walter Lippmann (1922), that the industrialized media had inverted the relationship between knowledge and power: instead of empowering the people with knowledge, they enmeshed the people in an increasingly overwrought pseudo-environment.

 

The press responded to the ensuing crisis in confidence by instituting modernist reforms. In law, the news media came to support increased first amendment protections on both the federal and state level, asserting for themselves an institutional claim to a privileged status in public communication. In journalism, reporters and editors began framing codes of ethics, underscoring the special responsibilities of the media in a modern age. The professional newspaper replaced the industrial newspaper. In news design, the parallel development was the first, or Protomodern, phase of the modern movement.

 

Protomodernism had its origins around the time of the first World War, when Ben Sherbow began a redesign of the New York Tribune (Hutt, 1973). He imposed a single typeface for headlines, combining upper- and lower-case letters, with the goal of typographic simplicity. Then, in a move called streamlining, John Allen (1947) pushed in the 1920s and 1930s for flush-left, asymmetrical headlines using type produced by his employer, the Mergenthaler-Linotype Co. (Barnhurst, 1994). Streamlining aimed for efficiency, the outcome Allen promised would follow from his innovations. Through such small steps modernism gained initial entry into the production of newspapers.

 

The larger contribution of Protomodernism affected how journalism conceived of newspaper pages, especially the front page. Modernist designers proposed a new way of viewing that took the entire page as a single canvas. Except on the occasional illustration page, traditional newspapering had ordered its physical existence on the column, measured by the square or the inch. Pages, as receptacles for columns, had little significance, and newspaper conductors would fill the columns out of other motivations, such as chronology or the flow of typesetting (see Chapter 3). The page as canvas (drawing a metaphor from art) or as display window (from commerce) imposed on journalism the logic of the social map. Within the newly conceived front page, professional news workers provided an orderly array - a functional map - of the day's news from top to bottom. Like a map, the front page also supplied a legend, that is, an index (an invention arriving very late in newspapers) that catalogued news in priority. Certain breaking events also received front-page notice in the form of summary boxes that pointed into the newspaper's interior. The elements of journalistic mapping guided readers through the news and, by analogy, into the world itself.

 

The Protomodern newspaper looks hopelessly old fashioned today. Its gray palette, limited illustration, and small scale for items seem closer to Victorian antecedents than to newspapers at the end of the century (Figure 6.6). Nevertheless, it challenged fundamental notions of journalism that had reigned from the mid-nineteenth century. In place of the declining metaphor of the market cornucopia, the top-down order of Protomodern news asserted clearly for the first time the sense-making power journalists wielded.

 

 

Classicist Phase (1930s - present)

As a cultural movement, modernism had many faces. One turned toward the people and expressed itself in a demotic reaching out toward crowds and masses of atomized individuals. The popular and tabloid press followed its own course (see Chapter 8). Another face of modernism turned backward and advanced by recovering from the archive of the distant past the forms that could replace the despised and flawed designs of the immediate past. The Classicist phase of modernism looked back.

 

A concern with authority drove much of the culture of the 1930s. In the United States, the massive federal projects of the New Deal consciously borrowed from Neoclassical forms of the Federalist era that had in turn recovered earlier English borrowings from ancient Greece and Rome, simplifying and popularizing them. In Germany, of course, the same stylistic drive inflated misappropriations from the mythologized past into the imperial forms of Nazi public culture, a grotesque version of classicism. Behind the classicist movement lurked a real crisis in political authority. Woodrow Wilson had proclaimed that the war would make the world safe for democracy, but authoritarian movements seemed to flow naturally, even inevitably, from it. Economic crisis deepened political troubles, prompted fears of disorder and class warfare, and called for top-down management of more and more of civil society. Democracies generated massive and intrusive bureaucracies, while other countries produced dictatorships.

 

Newspapers felt these developments keenly. In the United States, the precipitous decline of advertising revenue and the abandonment by readers newly impoverished in the Depression required newspapers to shorten themselves and wrung many weaker papers out of competitive markets. By the end of the Depression, no real question remained about whether the local daily newspaper formed a natural monopoly. Politically, the news media became increasingly conservative on the whole, protecting themselves from the New Deal and from various allied reform movements. The high point for Classicist concern about the crisis of democracy came with the 1947 report of the Hutchins Commission, A Free and Responsible Press. Here scholars and citizens fantasized a socially responsible press, one that would abjure profit in favor of civic leadership and even-handed representations of the diverse public.

 

In the visual arts, modern abstractionists (unlike expressionists, see Chapter 8) sought classical clarity in pure form. In newspapers, the most authoritative design movement took on a classical mien. Stanley Morison, who directed the redesign of the Times of London beginning in 1929, most influenced the development of Classicist modern style, elements of which American newspapers adopted later (Figure 6.7). Like colonial printers, classicists admired the printed book, and their designs aspired to a similar intellectual status. Although they employed many of the tools of modern design, including indexes, hierarchical order, and some asymmetrical layout, they did so with a gray reserve suitable for the voice of authority, sometimes unpunctuated by pictures.

 

 

The step from the Protomodern to the Classicist modern newspaper showed most clearly in spatial organization. Individual articles of news adopted from advertising the conception of unity within clear borders. For news, the most desirable form became the rectangle (although other shapes continued, see Barnhurst, 1991). Rectangles also, of course, reflected geometric notions greatly admired by abstract modern artists. The Washington Post provides the most consistent example of Classicist design (illustrated in Hutt, 1973, p. 214). Horizontal forms came to the fore as central in the organizing scheme, further expression of the ordering and taming power of journalism over runaway events.

 

These two phases, the Protomodern and Classicist modern, coexisted through mid-century. After the initial explosion of modernist energy, newspapers continued to elaborate the visual and content vocabulary of modernism. More newspapers moved from their older designs into modern ones. The redesign of the Los Angeles Times in 1936, which the following year won the Ayer Cup as the best designed American newspaper, used streamlined headings that anticipated designs still in use in the 1960s (illustrated in Hutt, 1973, p. 128). The look of modernism over the period became more pronounced. Space entered more firmly into daily use. Pictures took their place as (almost) full partners in the journalistic enterprise. Newspapers took advantage of technological changes, especially the development of offset printing and photo-typesetting, to enlarge space and pictures and to refine the levels of emphasis available in headlines. The new methods provided a full range of type sizes (subject only to the telescoping of photo-typographic lenses), unlike the limited sizes usually available in metal type.

 

High Modern Phase (1970s - present)

The cold war demanded a firm consensus on U.S. values. The precise meanings of American institutions and their unique superiority to other national traditions, the precise genius of the American character and its unique invulnerability to Fascism, the precise classlessness of the American economy and its unique ability to provide luxury for ordinary folk, and other classic elements of the American self-image found wide acceptance. Supporters included not only anti-Communist liberal and conservative elites but also the newly affluent middle class, now buying homes and cars, phones and refrigerators in ever greater numbers and going into debt at an unprecedented rate. The social revolution experienced by the middle class underpinned the apparent consensus. As the automobile, subsidized by massive federal highway programs, helped move the home out to the suburbs, appliances brought bread and circus - the refrigerator full of farm produce, the television full of amusements - into the home (Nasaw, 1993; Jackson, 1985). Home became an ideal self-enclosed world (Spigel, 1992), and the ironic endorsement of the hydrogen bomb gave a new meaning to the term nuclear family.

 

The powerful consensus achieved full expression in American newspapers when it had already begun to unravel. The dislocations of the Vietnam era made only slow inroads into the world of the newspaper, which ironically continued to pretend to be reporting World War II until quite late in the affair, noble exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding. Even as things fell apart in the short decade from Tet to Watergate, the news media continued to hover above the disarray, secure that they represented a moral consensus that was, to say the least, no longer fully believable.

 

When it reached its height in the 1970s, modernism had reduced the complexity of the news page to a series of rectangles (sometimes erroneously called modules). Publishers hired artistic consultants from outside the American newspaper industry, such as the British artist Frank Aris and the Italian graphic designer Massimo Vignelli, to accomplish redesigns based on Swiss-style grids (see the Vignelli design of The Herald, New York, 1971, in Barnhurst, 1994, p. 186). The horizontal form dominated layouts, although not without some strong vertical elements. Indexes and summary boxes grew in importance along with promotional items, called sky boxes, meant to entice the reader to look inside, in a direct borrowing from advertising and marketing. Larger display type and dominant images, often in color, imposed a simple order on the few remaining page-one stories.

 

In short, the High Modern phase brought all the tendencies of modernism to their culmination. The entire page worked together as a conceptual canvas, or in the case of front pages as an architectural façade, in the phrase preferred by design consultants. One element provided a center of visual attention, signaling the most important content judged according not to news events but to the entertainment value of the image. (Figure 6.8). In High Modernism, graphic design professionals ruled supreme or close to it (despite their many demurrers).

 

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