I guess the barbarians have breached the gates and made it inside the walls of the city.
Absolutely:
Thanks to Josh Ferrin for tweeting this.
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UPDATE:
The Journal then did it again, a few days later:
I don’t mind it so much in the dialogue balloon. But as a headline, reversed out of that blue bar? Ick.
And the Comic Sans typeface has responded to all this hate. In style:
You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type.
My morning pass through the day’s front pages posted at the Newseum produced a few clever items of which you might take note.
Let’s start with the promo at the top left of today’s Boston Globe:
Lee Steele of the Connecticut Post and the Region 1 Director of the Society for News Design blogged today:
I love a little visual wit, especially when it’s done so elegantly… Such simplicity is under appreciated; this just tickled me.
The Globe’s design director, Dan Zedek, admits:
That was me (I do page one on Monday and Tuesday nights, as well as the Sunday Arts sections).
We had some nice photos by staffers Wendy Maeda and Dina Rudick, but they lost a lot of their pop at the small size that fits in a skybox. The story is about new takes on a classic comfort food, so I played around with creating a more iconic typographic treatment. I’ve always loved those Herb Lubalin type treatments that use type to illustrate and this seemed like a chance to do that kind of thing.
My favorite part is the parens that both mimic a bowl and and work with teze type. I’m not totally happy with the end result: I wish I’d had more time to refine it, but I appreciate the nice note!
Clever and subtle. Average daily circulation for the Globe is 264,105.
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The other giant stoke of genius I spotted today was the centerpiece of today’s Tampa Tribune that covered the contentious Congressional hearings Tuesday starring five executives from Goldman Sachs.
Rather than use the standard mug shots, the designer chose to use — what else? — the upraised hands of the executives as they were sworn in:
Smart and funny. And not subtle at all!
Wendy Whitt, the Tribune’s audience editor, tells us:
The eye-catching five-hands display was the creation of Fred Stone, our A1 designer.
At the news meeting, we decided to go with the static shot of the swearing-in. Later, Fred presented the five-hands version as well as the original.
There was no doubt that the hands were more compelling, but we had to make sure we had the right words to pair with them. (The static shot would fit in the same spot if the words didn’t come through.) We discussed the other messages the hands communicated and thought they were appropriate.
Later, the managing editor looked at the page and agreed to go with it if we had the words to put the hands in context.
We think it worked. Glad you do, too.
The Tribune circulates 152,568 papers daily.
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The centerpiece photo of today’s Daily Press of Newport News, Va., caught my eye today:
The reason? The photo struck me as very similar to a famous old picture you may recall from history class:
The Daily Press picture was by staffer Eric Gillard. Average daily circulation for the Daily Press is 81,241.
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I’ll leave you today with an interesting headline by the New York Post, circulation 508,042:
The headline played off the language in the C-Span clip of the hearings. One was posted Tuesday to YouTube, amusing the $#!t out of everybody:
