A look at the interesting typography of Sarasota’s house flipping series
So did you notice the series of interesting fronts last week from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune?
This was day one — Sunday, July 19 — of their big six-part house flipping series. Like all the samples in this post, click it for a closer look:
No lead art. A giant, triple-decker all-cap headline.
But most importantly, that column of text for the lead story is between six and seven inches wide.
And this format carried through the entire series. Here’s day two, from June 20:
Intrigued, we contacted Michelle Greene, the Herald-Tribune’s assistant managing editor for visuals.
A 2000 graduate of Cal State-Fresno, Michelle spent two years at the Madera Tribune, about 20 miles northwest of Fresno. She spent two more years as a features designer at the Record in Stockton, Calif., before moving to Sarasota in 2004.
Michelle agreed to answer a few questions for us…
Q. This six-part series has a very distinctive look, mostly due to your typographical treatments. The main story on each, for example, runs in a single, four-column-wide column. What font, point size and leading is that? What is the width (in picas) of that huge column of text?
A. We used our standard body copy typeface Poynter Roman, developed by the Font Bureau and the Poynter Institute. We bumped up the point size and leading to 11 pts over 16 pts on a column width that ranged from 35p to 40p5 throughout the series.
The front for day three, July 21 — the first time the series actually had lede art for the front:
Q. What led you to try this approach to the story?
A. It was a culmination of many things. The first was that on most days there was no displayable art and our editors wanted to steer clear of illustrations. They wanted a cross between a magazine and a newspaper approach. Meaning: traditional newspaper design with flair.
Ron Borresen, left, and Tony Elkins
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We (Ron Borresen, page designer; Tony Elkins, features design director) worked on several prototypes trying to appease the editors while staying true to our own design styles. What we ended up with was 25 prototypes that were narrowed down to the top three by my team. From there a group of editors and reporters decided on which design they felt best illustrated their story.
Michelle showed us a few of these rejected prototype pages:
Q. Is this the first time you’ve tried something like this? Was it a difficult sale in your newsroom?
A. We have run a few other pages similar to this one so it wasn’t a hard sell. In fact, our executive editor Mike Connelly is fond of using type as main art, especially for larger enterprise stories.
Michelle sent examples of two examples of previous “type attack” treatments by the Herald-Tribune. On the left is a page from November; on the right is one from May:
Q. Conventional wisdom, of course, would be to keep your column widths under, say, 16 or 18 picas wide. Was there any concern that readability would be harmed by running the story that wide?
A. When breaking the rules there is always a concern about taking it too far. We had several conversations about readability, and after a design was picked we played with the type size and spacing until we felt comfortable that readability wasn’t compromised.
Days four and five — from left to right, July 22 and 23 — each had lead art:
Q. Did you do anything to try to improve readability at this width? There appears to be more leading for the lead stories, for example, than for the other stories on the page.
A. Yes, we increased the leading to help improve the readability and force some white space back into the package. We were attempting a more magazine/web page approach (i.e. loose wide width columns).
The series then took Thursday and Friday off to wind up this past Sunday, July 26, with a treatment similar to day two: A huge, four-deck all-caps headline:
Q. The headlines, too, are all-caps and, in some cases, three or four decks deep — especially on days on which you had no lede art for the package. How did this idea come about?
A. We knew without a lede art image that the headline type had to carry the page. We just expanded upon our standard lede headline style, all-caps san-serif Bureau Grotesque.
Q. How long did you have to work on that series?
A. Reporters worked on the series for a year. Originally, two weeks was built into the schedule for design and copy editing, but after rewrites, legal reviews and editing, we spent about 40 additional hours getting the project out. It wasn’t easy and was a constant battle to get the reporting finished so we could finesse the design.
What worked to our benefit was having a team effort. I created a consistent cover design for the series and handed it off to features design director Tony Elkins, who then worked out the first three days of the project. When he was finished I was then able to go back into the project with fresh eyes and fine-tune. Having an extra day or hour to edit made the package that much better.
We’re focusing on the page one design of this series, but the project also included a serious number of major infographics — all executed wonderfully by Herald-Tribune graphics editor Jennifer Borresen.
Yes, she’s married to the aforementioned page designer Ron Borresen.
Here are three examples of the pieces Jennifer pulled together for the series:
Q. What feedback have you received on the page one presentations you designed?
A. The bold display had an impact. Readers told us, in effect, that the design worked; it grabbed them by the lapels and made them pay attention.
Q. The whole series came out quite well — both in terms of content and design. But before we see a lot of copycat pages come along, what advice would you offer anyone hoping to break conventional typographical wisdom like this on page one?
A. This was the best solution we could have come up with at this time, under these circumstances, for this story. It’s all about context.
If I were to give any advice, it would be that content drives design. Without that, your design is worthless.
The Herald-Tribune has done a wonderful job of archiving the entire series for its web audience. Not only are all the stories, sidebars, photos and graphics available online, but also databases and videos that support the main points of the stories:
Best of all, the entire series, as it appeared in print, is available as a series of PDF files:
To download PDFs of each day:
- DAY 1: Sunday, July 19
- DAY 2: Monday, July 20
- DAY 3: Tuesday, July 21
- DAY 4: Wednesday, July 22
- DAY 5: Thursday, July 23
- DAY 6: Sunday, July 26
Find the Herald-Tribune’s house flipping series web site here.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I would like to add the analysis for half of those graphics was done by the lovely and talented Herald-Tribune reporter Paige St. John. She can crunch data and run new programs like no one else.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
I can’t say that I like the final results as much as some of the prototypes. I don’t think doing something different qualifies as “magazine design” especially since it’s hard to compare a broadsheet audience/publication in size and content to a magazine. I don’t think a magazine would really play one column across an entire page or page spread without heavy margins, making it really not that wide at all.
That said, I really like “the R word” and the rebound one and the graphics are great. Generally think some margins would’ve been helpful in the final pages since those single-column widths may have been legible but they are right on the absolute edge of tolerance.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Jenn B. is also as lovely as she is talented, but that photo just doesn’t do her justice.
July 31st, 2009 at 1:18 am
Who can concentrate on the ad at the bottom when Mack Brown is about to get hit in the face with a giant football! Ha, ha. I tease because I love. :)
July 31st, 2009 at 1:20 am
Oops, posted that to the wrong thread. This is my sign that I should go to bed and stop making snarky comments.