The front page of The New York Times suggested this last Sunday. When I saw it, I felt vaguely reassured. There was a great picture of Obama and some shining South Side kids in Chicago. It was taken by Mark PoKempner, who worked with me at The Maroon—the student newspaper at the University of Chicago 40 years ago. So, Hyde Park, PoKempner, a smiling candidate and happy kids all making the front page warmer that Sunday morning. But there was something else at work here: The picture was in black and white.

At first that made me think of the old New York Times, back in the days of Bookman and grainy “cuts,” badly printed. A certain wistful nostalgia.

Others have said that the monochrome photos recall the pre-color press coverage of the Kennedy campaigns, particularly Bobby Kennedy. A quick Google search (Bob Kennedy Black Kids) found, on the first try, a remarkably similar picture, which may even have been taken in Chicago as well. (Is that a Second City checker band on the policeman's hat, top right?)

I asked myself, is this on purpose? Is The New York Times unconsciously endorsing Obama by running the picture in black and white? There are all sorts of reasons to convert from color (since most photographs start in color these days, at least the digital ones): You get a smaller file size; blotchy skin color is smoothed over; dissimilar pictures can be grouped together; you suggest the early street photography of Cartier-Bresson, Atget and Frank; and you evoke “serious” photojournalism from the Magnum photographers shooting for Life in the ’60s. That is why my picture on this blog’s home page is black and white.

But the Times may have been doing more than art direction. The paper fell in step with the Obama campaign’s own efforts to connect the candidate with the Great Old Days, the ’60s. When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama, the campaign ran a spot (much of which was in black and white), pointing to the Kennedy-Obama connection. The Times took note.

Though conceived by musician Will.i.am, a feel-good YouTube video was another black-and-white, Kennedy era-inspired, Obama promotion, which the Obama campaign quickly adopted. The London Telegraph described it as this, “The retro feel of the black-and-white images is particularly inspired, invoking notions of the ’60s Civil Rights movement, and drawing oblique yet deliberate comparison to two of the most inspirational and affectionately recalled American leaders, President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.: ‘A president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a King who took us to the mountaintop,’ as Obama calls them in his speech.”

These promotions, along with the slew of inspirational, black-and-white Obama images found on his campaign’s home page, try to connect to that earlier, important time in history and the idealism of those visionary leaders.

Time magazine took the bait in the March 10 issue, directly comparing Obama with JFK. Newsweek ran a black-and-white photo of Obama on the cover of this week’s issue (May 19), and a black-and-white photo of a young Obama appeared on the cover of its March 31 issue.

And now the Times.

It just shows the power of good visual branding.

This was the killer graph of David Carr’s mournful recent column, “At the Journal, the Words Not Spoken.” There are two big assertions here—ones that helped cause the great slide in the newspaper business. First, Carr implies newspapers are for the newsroom, not for the readers. And second, he suggests that there’s something wrong with the owners of a paper actually running it.

These are wrong ideas, ones that have tripped up journalism over the last 50 years, setting a fluid, dynamic business like concrete, into a stiff, unresponsive institution. J-school defined the methodology; the unions dictated the job descriptions; and the big chains, with their organization charts and greed did the rest.

Reporters, led by The Newspaper Guild, acted on the assumption that their profession was as permanent as that of doctors and lawyers, and as such, could survive all kinds of specialization, never mind featherbedding. More than a profession, the newsroom was convinced that journalism was a public trust, which implies that the public was somehow complicit in this. Journalists believed that they had deserved this trust. The business was so good that the permanence of their social institution was taken for granted.

Of course the public was involved in the deal, but not in the way journalists came to think. People bought the newspapers, not so much because they needed them, but because they liked them. Newspapers were useful, yes, and even necessary during wars and recessions, but people paid money for them because they were interesting and sometimes fun.

The 1920s-style, general-assignment reporter (cf., The Front Page) who could cover anything and write it up beautifully, all the while drinking heavily, was actually interested in selling newspapers. He (and it was mostly male in those days, notwithstanding His Girl Friday, the remake of The Front Page, starring Rosalind Russell) took delight in a zesty mix of cranks, crackpots, clowns and crooked politicians. Newspapers ran the photo of plane crashes, the maps of battles, the profiles of movie queens and breakaway baseball players and random escaped zoo animals. There were not a lot of correspondents down at the city hall waiting for press releases.

They had competition at the beginning, but it was with other newspapers that might have writers who would occasionally be guilty of juicing up a quote to make a better read. Or worse. This underpaid hack was gradually replaced by a better-trained, more responsible specialist who turned in less copy. The rewrite desk, with wordsmiths in the “slot,” was abolished. By the time I started working on newspapers in school, the daily had become a boring update on minor changes to the social status quo, crime and traffic stories, and an occasional big “enterprise” piece that reminded you of a chapter in your social studies textbook.

Radio, TV and then the Internet carved away the assumed franchise and started to sap the great profits that the newspaper owners had gotten used to. In the last quarter, the newspaper decline seems to have taken a steeper dive, and some senior news executives doubt that they’ll be able to pull up before the revenue line crashes below the expenses line.

As with the federal government, it won’t help to keep doing more of the things that aren’t working. It won’t work to keep cheapening the product. To use Gordon Bethune’s line about a similar problem in the airline business: “You can take so much cheese off the pizza that nobody will eat it.”

A New York Times employee told me this weekend that an editor at NYTimes.com can’t put copy on the web site. Only a “producer” can do that. This is a perfect example of running newspapers like they were permanent fixtures on the landscape that could be loaded with all kinds of redundant job descriptions and still stand up. The designer who told me this probably has a better idea of what to do to turn around the paper than does Arthur Sulzberger, along with all of his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.

What is needed is a fundamental restructuring of the newspaper business. And it has gotten too late to expect the inmates to redesign the asylum. It’s going to have to be done by the proprietors. Willful, single-minded, near-genius proprietors like the ones who built the business. Sam Zell may not be the man to do it. He has not reduced the insanity at the Tribune Company no matter how many have quit or been laid off or fired. But he’s in a better position to fix the problem than the McCormick and Chandler heirs, or the stagnant old managers, or the stultified newsrooms in L.A. or Chicago (unionized or not).

Newspapers have about a year to get rid of all the people who can’t pull their own weight and to redeploy all the smart energetic journalists who can find the great stories and push them out to print, web and video. Some papers still have lots of talent, but they must push it to the front so readers can find it and find that they like it. Papers which continue to bury the smart people (or have already driven them away) will not make the cut. With the current recession, if newspapers don't move quickly, the market will crush them.

Rupert Murdoch knows something about markets and about restructuring (e.g., The Wapping dispute, 1986). He has a better chance of saving The Wall Street Journal than the Bancroft heirs did. Taking a page or two out of the Hearst or Pulitzer or Thomson books, Murdoch can work quickly and instinctively to change the paper. He already has by putting in more non-business news. Whether he is on the right track, time will tell. But I wouldn’t bet against him. Nor would I assume that “the Dirty Digger,” as they called him when he arrived in London, doesn’t understand good journalism. He is a born journalist. He takes great risks and will support great reporting, even when the establishment is pushing against him and the lawyers are lined up at the gate. (I was at the old New West when they did a piece on Jim Jones, whose legacy is the horrible “drinking the Kool Aid.” Murdoch owned New York and New West then, and when a number of California big wigs tried to get the magazine to stop the investigation, Murdoch said, “If you’ve got the goods, print the story. I’ll back you up.”) That’s what sells papers.

Whether the Times will counter by out-reporting and out-writing the Journal on its own turf—business—is unlikely, but that would be an easier goal than Murdoch’s. This competition might save both papers’ business propositions.

The reporters and editors of The Wall Street Journal, of all papers, should know this, and know about the value and rights of private property. If they had been truly watching the markets, they would have known that the newspaper business is in a tailspin, and unlikely to pull out of it. They should have been ready for the crash.

David Carr described their sadness to see a colleague, Marcus W. Brauchli, go. But, they shouldn't have been surprised.

Early in the year Sam Berlow and Cyrus Highsmith (of the Font Bureau) did an entertaining piece in the Boston Globe about what type styles say about the presidential candidates who are using them. Some of the worst examples were for people like Huckabee, who have quit the race. (Bad design makes you lose.)

As is the way with the media, the blogs picked up this discussion, and the phone at the Font Bureau started ringing. Sam did an entertaining interview with NPR, in which he described the Optima logo of McCain, as “one that can talk to Feingold and can talk to Bob Dole at the same time.”

A few weeks later Jessica Bennett from Newsweek was doing another piece, and contacted me for a web-video interview, in which I did okay on, although it hasn’t become a big hit on YouTube. Then CNN called and I did a very quick interview with Campbell Brown on “Election Center.” and paraphrased Sam by calling the McCain logo a Mmugwump’s choice.

Barack Obama has made the best use of branding since Ronald Reagan, and, as Michael Beirut noted in the Newsweek blog, Stumper by Andrew Romano, Obama has an unprecedented consistency in design. “I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, ‘Oh, we ran out of signs, let’s do a batch in AArial.’ It just doesn’t seem to happen. There’s an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.”

Designers tend to favor Obama, and that, itself, is interesting. It’s like Apple. Designers like people who like design, and as Apple has shown with the iPod and the iPhone, it’s not just the designers. The market for good design is improving. You see that with Target. You see it with Audi. Good design is beginning to sell.

Obama recently changed his logotype, from Perpetua upper-and-lower, to Requiem, redrawn to reduce the weight slightly and to clip the serifs. This must have made Jonathan Hoefler happy, since his foundry also released Gotham, which Obama uses for the slogans on posters, and for the labels on his web site.

On his own blog, Jonathan did a funny send up of the Hillary and McCain logos, pointing out that McCain’s Optima is in frequent use in the packages of cheap cosmetics (probably in imitation of Estee Lauder). I didn’t get time to mention on CNN that the typeface also happens to be German, which I doubt the old solider knew when he picked it.

McCain probably did not spend much time on the decision. Somebody showed him a sketch, he saw the general’s star, and he said okay. From the look of his suits, the senator doesn’t put much stock in appearances, and he probably doesn’t like the word, “branding.”

But Hillary and Obama know all about suits. Hillary’s team, I imagine, carefully, even laboriously, developed her logo, starting with using her first name. From the looks of the bold, condensed Baskerville, that logo got redrawn a few times. But the flag swoosh makes that purposeful persistent (relentless?) logo look insecure.

Obama famously tossed his flag lapel pin, so relaxed and confident is he, and the red stripes in his “O” mark (sunrise over a plowed field?) shows a much more sophisticated command of design in politics than we have seen before. In the old days, a Democrat's only concern with a campaign poster was whether it had the printer’s union bug on it. But Obama’s graphics are, as Beirut noted, surprisingly consistent and effective. (No one has mentioned that Hitler had bold, effective and highly consistent graphics, too.)

The Obama camp, having established real momentum in the visual brand, has encouraged designers and artists to join in. The best example is Shepherd Fairey’s stunning “HOPE” poster. A Google image search for “Obama poster” yields dozens more, not all with the approved Gotham font.

It”s hard to build community and retain control, but it’s working so far. I am not, however, sure about the new logo. It seems a little too formal for this campaign. The upper-and-lower was more friendly and open. And now we are beginning to see the O-mark rendered in 3-D, like a NFL team button on the ESPN site. And there are scary glows behind the Barack pictures on the home page. This tweaking is getting too slick for Obama. The Gotham worked because it reminds us a bit of the wood type on the old Kennedy posters. These visual brands must project a sense of authenticity.

Today’s voters may respond to all the design effort by a candidate, but if it gets too slick it stops looking real.

Wow, posted below two videos, who could ask for more. Who’s managing their rendering in the long term? Never mind, we’ll get to that later.

I’ve known font expert Bill Hill for many years, and have always enjoyed his colorful rendering of everything having to do with type. But colorful rendering of type itself, now that's another thing. I’ve watched ClearType from its infancy, experimented extensively with the ClearType font collection and other Windows font products used in Microsoft Office programs and... elsewhere on Vista. I’ve examined the ClearType patent and clinical studies of ClearType, and I’ve been down into the hints, flags and contours, as well as through details so arcane it’d drive a sane person to Green Stamp collection. But I intend to do more. For now, though, I’d just like to address half of the resolution issue Bill has raised in his post.

Well, actually, I’m here to undress it, like the Emperor’s new clothes. This insistence that higher resolution ‘Will Come’ and ‘Save’ reading on the web, and save Microsoft’s ClearType, and presumably Apple’s Quartz along the way, is pretty far-fetched. How far-fetched? Let’s see, it took 20 years, from 1986 until 2006 for screen resolutions to crawl, generally, from 72 dots per inch or less, to 96 dpi or more, (...are we done yet?).

20 years is a long time in today’s culture, and that was only, generally, a 33% increase in resolution. It was enough to cast type from its long-sat one-pixel-per-stem perch, into the fuzzy land of mostly ad hoc anti-aliased rendering we see today, with 1.3 pixels-per-stem. It was also an increase so small and gradual that it didn't upset the scale of the mostly unscalable database of web-published images in the world. It was also pretty cheap, from 72 dpi or less, to 96 dpi, with the cost of new displays actually falling.

What’s next? Well, Bill Hill says we are going to have display resolutions climb up into the 200 dpi range, roughly a 200% increase in resolution. He already has one of these displays! And, this coming increase makes us hopeful for type on screens to improve by engineering, not art or craft. But has this ever happened before? I mean, has technology ever morphed and rearranged itself to deal with what is exclusively a type problem?

80 dpi is what one finds on Google when one searches for “highest resolution television”. 80 dpi! I’m sure they are lying, and my calculation was quick, but I’ve done this before. HDTV, video, LDTV, DVD, do not require 200 dpi for clarity. What drives modern markets and technology in this world is image quality. What happens, and has happened to type over the millennia of its existence, is that it’s design, making and use, folds into the needs of the wider world’s imagery, with whatever quality that brings. The world does not fold neatly around the needs of type.

In addition, 2 billion users upgrading to 200 dpi at only $1,500 each would cost — my calculator says “3e+12”, my speech reader says “three times ten to the twelfth” — a very big number. Even if that spending and manufacturing were spread out over a decade or two, what it means is that all the unscalable internet objects, including pages, either shrink, get re-rendered, or convert to scaleable objects, for the sake of type? And, all this works on multiple platforms in a resolution range from 72 to 240 dpi?

Hmmm. Let me plan this coronation later. For now, I think it is safe to assume we are headed for access to universal reading with the resolution we’ve got. Where does this leave all those bitching and moaning, scrapping and fighting, screaming and yelling, biting and hitting, mud slinging, name calling, 911 dependent, font experts?

Don’t ask me, I’m a type designer.

That was half of the resolution story. The other half: “What the hell is resolution, to type, anyway!?”, soon! Who’s managing their rendering in the long term?

Arthur Hochstein has been at Time since 1985. He was doing covers when I helped rethink their logo and cover layout c. 1993, and became chief art director in 1994. Both have implemented redesigns in the last year. I asked them, via e-mail, a few hard questions starting with the hardest:

The death of the newsmagazine has been predicted regularly for at least 30 years. What is their role in 2008? - RB

*    *    *

AMID: When I returned at Newsweek last year after Jon Meacham was made editor, and we were thinking about the design changes we wanted to implement, we felt strongly that we needed to get more stories in the magazine and at greater length. What the newsmags still do best is take the blizzard of news and events of the week and put them in context, separate what’s important from what is not, advance the story, and with great journalism, visuals and writing — creating an experience you can’t get on the web.

Last summer we ran a cover story “Slaughter in the Jungle” about a family of silverback gorillas that were murdered in the Congo. We had a portfolio of amazing pictures by Brent Stirton to go along with the exclusive reporting in the field. We received the photography Wednesday evening after receiving some e-mails that they were some powerful images. By Friday morning, it was the cover story. We still have the resources to do these types of important stories. But the newsmags have to bring their own content to the table. The days of rehashing the week’s news is long gone.

ARTHUR: Of course, rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated. First it was national editions of newspapers, then 24-hour TV news, then then the Internet, then mobile phones, feeds, etc, etc. Last time I checked we’re not only still here, but still making money for our parent companies. That said, we’ve made changes, some seismic, some incremental, that have allowed us to adjust to the rapidly changing environment. Since Amid and I are fighting the same war, it’s not surprising that our respective magazines have similar outlooks about what we need to do. That is, push the print magazine toward being a companion to the dotcom version — not its mirror image — while enhancing the brand power of each venue. Newsweek is taking one tack; Time’s is a bit different.

One thing that really struck me about our Person of the Year this year was that before one copy of the print issue was in readers’ hands, the announcement, the story, and the reaction to the story in the mainstream media and the blogosphere had already taken place. Before the ink is dry, we've been through two or three news cycles. Does that mean the large-circulation newsweekly is bound for extinction? No, but it certainly suggests that some harsh realities must be accepted and that all of our ingenuity and effort will be needed for us to embrace change and take risks to survive.

I just realized I didn’t really answer your question — I should go into politics! The short answer is that the print magazine shouldn’t try to be a website, and the website shouldn’t try to be a print magazine. I think the extent to which we accomplish that will have a lot to say about how successful we are going forward. I agree with Amid about original content, both in stories and visuals. Whenever I see anything in the print magazine that has been all over the internet, it makes me really crazy. But we do have such a diverse readership that we can’t marginalize ourselves either.

RB: How closely should your magazine’s website resemble the print edition?

AMID: I think it is imperative that Newsweek speak with one visual voice no matter what medium you may be using to consume our content. When we started to examine the look of the magazine, I wanted to revive and focus the most fundamental elements of Newsweek’s design. The logo of the magazine is one of the most instantly recognized in publishing, but it certainly needed a trip to the gym. It was unreadable online, and a blob on your Blackberry. Jim Parkinson, who drew the original logo in 1985, did a fantastic job slimming down and modernizing the logo without losing any of it’s integrity. In this case, the logo also represents an institution and there was a certain amount of caution from the corner office that we had to navigate through. We also had Jim produce a complimentary slab serif that we could use in all media for rubrics, headers and graphics that would be recognized quickly as Newsweek content.

Another reason for visual linkage is that many times an online reader may not know that they are at Newsweek.com. They started at Google or MSN and clicked on “World’s Largest Squid Found” (nine million hits and counting!) and that sent them to our content. Newsweek’s largest online audience is usually during breaking news and many of these users also read the weekly magazine. Also, there are always great stories that thrive online (see “New Dehli’s Monkey Invasion!” in Newsweek.com’s top photo galleries of 2007). Finally, one of the great aspects of having the web and the mag is that we can post more news, commentary and photography than can possibly fit in the magazine.

ARTHUR: This is a simple question with a complicated answer. It all depends on philosophy. Basically, on the level of branding and sensibility, they should be similar, while on the level of content, they should be different.

For instance, when you have a brand as strong and entrenched as Time or Newsweek, parts of that that brand identity that help in print may be counterproductive on the internet. Because the internet is a 24/7 medium, it may hurt that readers associate our brands with a weekly product-they may think, “why read Time on the internet when their news is a week old,” not realizing that the website is an ever-changing news and information site. At one time I actually proposed changing the name of Time.com to EMIT.com, a name that would evoke the Time brand but tell the reader that this is a very different rendition of our product. Of course it went nowhere. On the other hand, certain attributes associated with our brands-authority, thoroughness, comprehensiveness-are assets on any platform. So they need to be the same and different simultaneously.

In my admittedly limited experience with our online product, I have been frustrated by the number of limitations placed on design detailing and graphic inventiveness. Our print redesign imparted a great deal of graphic purity and modernity that has been hard to translate to the online product. While I understand that this is an almost universal phenomenon in multi-platform publications, I do think some magazines, newspapers and merchants do a better job of keeping their visual branding consistent than others, and we need to constantly examine our own product to attain a higher standard. And of course, the two media are vastly different in terms of user experience. The simplistic (and idealistic) answer is that I’d like to see our print version gravitate toward and leverage the strengths of the medium-dynamic and beautiful photography, longer-form stories that feature deep reporting and analysis, while our website gets easier to navigate, less overwhelming in terms of the barrage of content we expect a viewer to absorb, and more interactive.

There’s a broader issue here as well that I’d like to throw back at you two: In terms of my own reading habits, I’m certainly no Luddite-the vast majority of my media consumption is online. But in terms of the rewards and intrinsic satisfaction of design, print has it all over the internet. Do you see a talent drain, or at least the phenomenon where the kind of talents that used to be drawn to print design are simply pursuing other fields because web design is so much more utilitarian?

RB: There is definitely a brain drain. It’s harder and hard to find young designers who want to go into magazines or newspapers. But I find some kids who share my frustrations with the web, which is an imperfect medium for narratives of any kind. Eventually we will have platforms that create a better story-telling experience, and we’ve seen interim steps with The New York Times Reader and Indigo. The question is, can the print organizations who are now paying for the narratives survive long enough to make the transition. The market guarantees nothing. And in the meantime, editors are trying to make their publications more “webby”, which may be the wrong idea. What if they became more narrative? Time and Newsweek are grappling with that idea. But they are never going to run the 10,000-word John McPhee thumpers or the 7,000-word Hunter Thompson screeds that we used to see in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.

The illustrator’s sketchbooks have disappeared. We don’t see any big “side-of-beef” infographics. And what about picture stories? All we get are galleries of celebrities. Where are the “Day in Life” narratives? Is there a risk, at a time when there is less and less room for visual content, that we’ll forget how to assign, edit and design picture stories?

AMID: It’s all about less room and less time. It is not uncommon that a photographer on assignment will send us amazing images after the issue is essentially closed, as we did recently, from Kenya. We then fight to clear pages and get those pictures in the magazine during those final hours. Stories burn so fast that by the next week the Kenya pictures would be too late. We got it in, and the result was a dramatic, efficient photo presentation that otherwise may never have been published.

Concerning the “brain drain,” a new generation of designers that is living through the digital revolution, can’t and won’t commit to one narrowly focused design medium, especially a shrinking one. I’m often surprised and slightly jealous at how fluent young designers are in so many more media from photography and web graphics, to “branding exercises,” typography and filmmaking. They love the history and romance of magazine design and the newsweeklies (the traveling bar cart ended years ago), but view print as one form of visual communication in an ever expanding toolbox. I also think the explosion in the other design disciplines such as architecture, fashion and furniture also led to less soldiers in print. Look at House Industries, which started as a type studio and took their philosophy about type culture and applied it to clothing, music and luggage. It is also harder to find designers that want to embrace a journalistic aesthetic, where the visuals and editorial exist together on a more balanced plane.

That said, there is a finite amount of space in the magazine, but infinite space on the website. My editor’s mantra these days is, “If the reader has finished the magazine before the plane takes off, we haven't done our job.” So there is lively, heated debate each week on how long each story should run, what do we have that is exclusive, what’s the web extension and how many pages to commit for photography and graphics. The goal is to create a magazine experience that a reader is going to commit some time to. As more web users go to mobile and handheld, will stories on the web get even shorter? A big hit on Newsweek.com is a video called “the run-through” where Jon Meacham goes behind the scenes and previews the weeks issue. As the video model moves front and center on many news sites, will photojournalism be marginalized? This campaign year you will see both Time and Newsweek serve the electorate in ways that no other organization can. It will be interesting to see which platform gets the most attention.

ARTHUR: I do think I see a significant talent drain. I know if I were 25 years old again (hmm . . . don't get me going on that!) I would not be thinking at all about print design. Especially in graphics, where there has always been a relatively small talent pool. I think your points about magazines too “webby” are right, but most editors and publishers have the mindset that nobody wants to read long pieces anymore, that magazines do them to win ASME awards and have bragging rights at Michael’s. That may or may not be true. Plus, there’s a perception-whether accurate or no-that there’s more money to be made working for an online product.

And for news/information publications, I think that the failure to leverage the advantage of print in the presentation of certain kinds of photography and graphics could really damage their chance for long-term survival. But I think if the best minds were still entering publishing entities that have both print and online components, we might see better coordination between the two, which would then not force young designers to make the obvious choice.

Why Helvetica? The main argument is its ubiquity, via laser printers and operating systems. Its utility is marginal. It has even disappeared from the big newspapers that used it for headlines (USA Today, The Guardian). There is a pleasant, numbing modernness about it that now evokes a bit of 50-year-mark nostalgia, in the same way that the egregious row of office towers on Sixth Avenue (developed in the 60s as an extension to the wonderful Rockefeller Center) today look agreeably mid-century modern.

You can now buy the Helvetica DVD from Amazon.

Clearview

The new Helvetica is Clearview, which is like saying, as they do in the magazine business, that the new “up” is “flat.” I missed blogging on The New York Times Magazine picture story this summer which showed in surprising detail the development and implementation of this new design for highway signs. The Times completely bought the argument that this is a big improvement, but (as with many things in that magazine) it is really a matter of style.

The Clearview team, Don Meeker and James Montalbano, follow the Humanist orthodoxy laid down Alfred Edward Johnston, who was responsible for the lettering of the London Underground, the granddaddy of all modern transportation graphic systems (also discussed in that ATypI post).

The new font replaces the vernacular “Highway Gothic,” which Tobias Frere-Jones adapted as Interstate. The real question about these styles is the style question. Do you go with the Johnston broad-edged orthodoxy, or go with James Mosely in the love of the somewhat tougher, built-up lettering?

Functionally, Clearview is not the clear winner. There are a few Johnstonian design elements, such as the little tail on the bottom of the lower-case “l” that may enhance readability. Counters are bigger, as the team put to work some worthwhile observations about the spread caused by the reflection of the sign material. The results were shown by the Times in the magazine, and as an interesting slide show on the web. However, as a five-minute Illustrator study indicates, the legibility of signs is more a matter of size and spacing than the difference in design.

Design equity

I share with Mosely, Benguiat, Parkinson and Downer a love of the expressive letterforms that exploded on the scene with the commercialization of printing during the Industrial Revolution. The sweet chancery or foundational script, preached by Johnston as the Mother of All Letterforms, is a wonderful thing, and the style has infused the work of great designers from Zapf to Unger. I was lucky enough to learn the chancery gospel as a child from Paul Standard, the American apostle of the movement. Yet, there are a lot of magnificent typefaces out there that have nothing to do with it.

And I just plain like the Interstate style, which is derived from old American sign-painting rather type or calligraphy. It’s a matter of taste, or if you will, religion.

There is something else at work here: nostalgia. I’ve remarked before that nostalgia is a function of the human assumption that the way things were when we first noticed them is the way they are supposed to be.

Thus, there is a momentum or inertia in a successfully deployed style over many years, like the Interstate highway fonts. Of course most drivers won’t notice when the signs change to Clearview. But I would have stuck with Highway Gothic on the grounds that is is so familiar, that it has a long history, and that it works (if indeed it could be made to work better).

It has design equity in its favor, like the Ludlow Bookman which The New York Times chucked in favor of a new, soft and vaguely Presbyterian Cheltenham. (The original Cheltenham, with its absurdly high-hat ascenders, was Episcopalian, like many of the churches built by its designer, Bertram Goodhue.) Why change? Tom Bodkin, the Times’ AME for design, would argue that the move to Cheltenham was made to unify the paper’s design equity, which contained a lot of Cheltenham. (Others would say that the front page’s Latin Elongated was an equally key component.) So this may be a matter of style, too. I just would have gone with the Bookman.

In 2007 we saw font changes as a result of redesigns at Time and Newsweek, also blogged about here. I miss Time’s Times Roman, despite the fact the font is as generic as Helvetica, for the same reasons. (Can you remember the 1970’s design of Communication Arts, which used Times Roman throughout as an expression of good contemporary design?)

Time was one of the first magazines to use the typeface, following the lead of its sister magazine, Fortune. (I imagine that Henry Luce was the first importer of Times New Roman, right after World War II. Perhaps he was the reason Linotype was able to get a license to the design.) With this much design equity, why change the body type to Proforma? Instead, why not get Petr van Bloklund to do a rethink of Times?

Later in the year Newsweek arrived with a new design, which, partly due to my own influence, was more familiar. Amid Capeci, the art director, switched backed to a Bureau Grot — from Knockout (aka Champion), Hoefler’s fine series done for Sports Illustrated, and inspired by the same 19th century wood types that Jerry Smokler used for all those great CBS Records covers in the 60s). It was a grot, too, and both changes may have escaped many readers.

Newsweek’s art director in the early 00s, Lynn Staley, had tired of the Stephenson Blake-derived Grotesques which I had started installing in 1985, in part because they had become over-familiar and dated. The problem with the Champions is that not only S.I. had put them in, but so did Forbes and a number of monthlies. Newsweek looked fresher, although more generic, and soon as the style ebbed, it was just as dated.

Nowadays grots are less ubiquitous, and by interpolating a new width (lighter and more condensed than the original Newsweek No. 9 by Parkinson) the magazine got a fresh look, somehow more like Newsweek than the previous design. At least to me.

In December a new design appeared for Reader’s Digest, where I tried to invoke the equity of the Bradbury Thompson design of the 60s. That effort, with the Granjon fonts and Big Caslon, did what it set out to, but editorially the magazine did find a younger audience. It may be that the nostalgic redesign was the wrong signal, and new editor Jackie Leo was brought in a few years later to rethink it.

The logo (which Parkinson had restored from the Thompson era) was gone over with a ball-peen hammer, and the interior design, including the great use of illustration directed by James McMullan himself, was brought way down market.

Leo’s efforts, if anything, failed worse, and a new design has now been ushered in just as she was pushed out the back door. A new logo has an emphasized “Digest,” like that’s the good part. The interior, designed by Hannu Laakso, the staff art director who came in when I was working on the project more than ten years ago, is energetic and well-paced, but is it the Reader’s Digest anymore?

This design equity thing is clearly mixed with nostalgia. Yet as magazines and newspapers continue on the glide path to oblivion, they seem more and more desperate to do redesigns that throw away their past. This, just as us old Boomers have more money and more time than ever.

I guess that the Digest was afraid that all the people who loved the old magazine are dying or that they may be already dead. It’s been a long time since the magazine had the zing and utility of the days when the idea was that this was the magazine to read if you could read only one. Why wouldn’t that work today, when people have even less time on their hands, and much more media? Maybe the new editor will channel DeWitt Wallace.

Certainly Adam Moss at New York is channeling Clay Felker with great success. The magazine has never seemed more up-to-date, and its web site has come alive. And Jon Meacham at Newsweek is channelling Oz Elliot (with a whiff of Parker, as Maynard would say), just as David Remnick is channeling Harold Ross at The New Yorker.

Reading

The New Yorker, in its year-end issue, ran a thoughtful and sobering essay by Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books.” I have been arguing that the circulation problem with publications is not just the Internet, it’s a combination of social changes. When the news is not catastrophic, when survival is seldom on our minds, people are not compelled to read newspapers. When one’s social sphere is more interesting than events in Pakistan, then you get MySpace and FaceBook, instead of Time.

I’ve been hoping that if the printed media provided richer narratives, their fortunes might improve. People love stories, and writing and reading is a direct and economical way to exchange them. But now Crain comes along with evidence that MacLuhan’s Post-Literacy is upon us. People are reading less, and are less able to read. YouTube is a leading indication of narratives moving toward the visual, and Crain argues that the non-literates actually think differently than literate ones. (This may be different with post-literates than it is with pre-litereates. We just don’t know yet.) If you extend his line of thinking, video voicemail will replace e-mail, and audio or video blogs will replace the text kind.

Crain suggests that those of us who love reading will end up being a kind of antique crafts group, or a bridge club, with none of the social caché that literacy gave readers in the Middle Ages. This unwelcome marginalization of reading, even if those of us in the margin were considered to be an elite, is much more frightening than the decline in the market cap of media companies. Indeed, if the kind of intelligent discourse required in a democracy were relegated to an “elite,” we would be in big trouble as a society. Worse, if enough people think “the news just comes to” them and that their opinion and their vote have no consequence, our whole political system could be taken over by a despot.

Once again I may be suffering from the nostalgia thing, and think writing is the best narrative form since that was the way when I got here. Nevertheless there are counter trends to what Crain contends: The Internet is distributing more text than anyone thought possible, and engendering more. They say there are 70 million blogs now, which sure beats Mao’s “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Text messaging may keep people writing, even if they never mail a first-class letter. And despite all the technology improvements that makes it possible for a movie to be made by a crew of one, motion pictures still take a lot more time to produce than a written story, and time is something we are short. And lack of time must be a big reason for the decrease in reading.

Crain, what is more, is talking about passive media. A major benefit of the Web is the commentary — the fact that you can comment on the text — or on the video. Sometimes the comments add up to more than the blog. The extremely focussed, interactive side of the Internet may extend the life of writing and reading past the time when people have stopped reading potboiler bestsellers. Instead of being defined as producers or consumers, we may be coming to a media market where everyone is doing a little of both.

Resolution

This blog kind of trailed off in 2007, and I promise to get it going again in the New Year, along with exercising more, dieting, and being an all-around nicer guy. . . .

And clearly I have to start video-blogging.

T, you see, is done in Flash. The first tip off is a damnably slow splash page (what year is it now?), that plays with the “T” logo. I am not sure why Flash designers love these intros, probably something to do with “branding,” but this user was happy to find the little “Skip Intro” line at the bottom.

Once through it, you get a closeup of Natalie Portman, under considerable makeup. As you paw around, finding the menus under the black top nav bar, Natalie twitches a little, in the manner of Max Headroom. Ultimately you realize this is the cover of the magazine, and that in the lower right there is a link to a video player which shows the talking head of Portman, with stylishly jumpy editing . Not linked is the actual cover story by Lynn Hirschberg, in “The Words” menu.

There are some entertaining interactive pieces:

• An interactive shopping map of Buenos Aires.
• A spread on the great Schabel from, a magazine layout that has been opened up.
• A visual index to “Remix”, a series of short items.
• “The Images”: Several innovative presentations for picture stories.

And there is a live, HTML blog, “The Moment,” currently featuring Art Basel. This is the only “part” of T that allows comments.

What’s wrong with it? The flaws are all caused by style calls:

• The splash page.
• It seems alienated from the browser, its back button, its text size controls. (Why not just go to full-screen?)
• The navigation seems odd, perhaps just a matter of getting used to, but try changing pages! You wish there was a more button at the foot of each leg of text.
• It doesn’t work unless you are connected to the Internet
• It doesn’t work on an iPhone.
• Not enough distinction between the ads and the art
• Tiny, blurry type.

But on the whole, it’s an important moment in content design online. It’s not just another web site, like so many of the recent ballyhooed redesigns. T fits its subject matter, and it tells stories in a compelling, interactive way.

The Times now ranks as the most visible mainstream pioneer in defining new digital narrative forms. Starting with The New York Times Reader, now two years old, the august newspaper has indicated the direction away from the static pages of the print medium to something richer, more diverse and still portable. It could be improved, of course: A redesign now could give it more currency and interactivity. The surprising thing is that Reader has not been widely copied. This shows you how stuck in the past most publishers are.

The Reader is built on WPF, the presentation layer of Vista, which we thought was going to be pried loose from Windows and floated onto cell phones and . . . the Mac. But WPF-e (for everywhere) never happened. Instead we got Silverlight, still in Beta, which was competes with Flash, but misses some of the essential features used in the Reader—the offline state, dynamic resizing of layouts, and Cleartype.

Adobe meanwhile had followed WPF, and started rebuilding Flash to handle some of the same features. The Flash player was made to work outside the browser window—content could be downloaded to be played offline. And font rendering was improved considerably. (Although not enough to make T very readable.)

It is significant that The Times turned to Flash for its online version of T. But it only works online, and the only live, comment-able part is in run outside the Flash magazine.

Nevertheless, the result is a marvelous experience: modern, light, minimal, and expressive. It can be important marker on the path toward the future of magazines. T will have made its mark if other publishers and TV producers take note of it and try their own narrative, rich-media, interactive digital magazines.

*    *    *

In related news: The weekly Indigo digital magazines now run in a web browser, or you cam download them in their original form, a stand-alone Flash player. Indigo was designed and developed by Danilo Black Mexico.

RB: It is clear that the form is more important, not everyone likes to read the entire package; instead people are happier reading summaries, highlights or conclusions. With all the distractions people have today, editors can not expect readers to go through the entire content — one subject at the least — starting from the first word and going all the way trough the end. Ask an editor to analyze how he reads the text and then, arrange some design structures to push the content to the top of the page. Most of all, the magazine should have a visual content and the text needs to leave space for this. That’s why I want to say that there is a need to use images that can tell their own stories.

Most magazines forget about telling stories with photos or illustrations, and use only art that repeats the text content — and what’s worst: that are barely even decorative.

FC: How long does it take to redesign a magazine? When do you think a change is needed in the looks of a magazine?

RB: It can take from a week to six months depending on the size of the effort and magazine. If you need to keep on working until the magazine “looks just the way it”s supposed to look”, the readers will perceive the changes as natural and that the magazine was always that way; when you reach that point, the design of the magazine will seem logical and you won’t need to redesign it, you will merely have to make a few “upgrades”.

FC: Could you tell us a little about the cover? When is there a need to change the cover and how do you best design one?

RB: The problem with covers arises when they seem all alike, if your cover seems like every other one in the newsstand, it is time to create a new idea.

FC: What can you tell us about the future of our profession? Will the internet revolutionize the way we work?

RB: Obviously magazines will find digital forms that will help them to publish their material, to increase their coverage and make their distribution easier. A model of what we can see in our digital future is in this Mexican website: http://reporteindigo.com. Anything that people make will have a space in printed magazines, as long as there are people who read them.

The content is generated from a series of interviews with luminaries from the design conference circuit including Massimo Vignelli, a steadfast Helveticist, and Michael Beirut, whose wry comments about the corporate inevitability of the font cracked up the ATypI audience. Then the talk turned negative. Erik Spiekermann, typecast as the irascible aging wunderkind, inveighed against the font, as did Paula Scher. Their point was that the type is overused and not that legible, with the characters all drawn numbingly alike. Neither summoned the withering acidity that Paula directed at ITC Garamond in a legendary debate at the Type ’87 conference in New York.

At the end, some younger designers, like Michael C. Place and Stefan Sagmeister rallied around the typeface. They think of Helvetica as just part of the cultural atmosphere. They breathe it in, graffiti and all, and spit it out cheerfully, if randomly. The Helvetica establishment must cringe, but these Young Turks are the spiritual heirs of the Basle Gewerbeschule, of Wolfgang Weingart and the late great Dan Friedman.

Nobody in the movie really explained why the type has become universal, unless you agree that there is such a thing as a perfect typeface. Sumner Stone and other ATypI folks, chatting at the break afterwards, concluded that there was a lot of chance involved. Helvetica (and Times Roman) had become the standard fonts of the graphic design world in the 60s and 70s. When Xerox put the first fonts on laserprinters (1979?) those two were included. Later HP and Apple followed suit. The first Apple Laserwriter had both burned into ROM, using Adobe Postscript outlines. (The other two fonts were Symbol and Courier—the latter made of strokes, not outlines.)

The movie set up the ATypI conference well, suggesting that there are rival ideologies in type design, as well as generational styles and technological evolution. There is all of that.

At the beginning of the main conference another motion picture was shown, a documentary about Eric Gill by Luke Holland, Looking for Mr. Gill. This charming documentary is one of five by Holland about village life in Britain, made for the BBC. The director lives in Ditchling, not far from Brighton, a little town so cute that it’s a wonder they don’t make more movies there. Gill is invoked through the memories of the townspeople — an extraordinarily intelligent and articulate lot. Some of them relatives of his girlfriends or apprentices, living in the village and up the road in Ditchling Common — where Gill established a commune half a century before the hippies came along — and with somewhat wilder sex than I remember from the 60s. The whole idea of it stole the show.

Gill was a student of another Ditchlinger, Edward Johnston, whose landmark Writing, Illuminating and Lettering (1906) shifted the world of lettering and type design from Spencerian to Chancery. Gerald Fleuss showed how he created a calligraphy-based aesthetic cosmology that changed the thinking of D.B. Updike and Stanley Morison, powered the revival of Italian Renaissance in the 1920s (think, Centaur and Bembo), and continues on in the work of contemporary type designers such as Summer Stone, Robert Slimbach and Gerard Unger.

The Brighton ATypI came into focus around the importance of Johnston, not for his most-cited work, the proto-modern London Transport lettering, but for starting the movement which turned away from the expressive, commercial letterforms of the 18th and 19th centuries — all the delicious scripts, sweet moderns, hunky Egyptians and the early, gangly sans serifs. This was the Humanist revival, and God spare you if you got in its way. This kind orthodoxy led to the rigid theories of modernism (if not modernism itself), whose adherents enforce their own party-line Political Correctness, and have no more use for the eclectic clutter of the old type books as Johnston did.

The typographic link between Humanism and Modernism is Gill sans — a Humanist, geometric sans. It was only a short step from Gill to Futura. Helvetica, on the other hand, is really a grot — the original name was Neue Haas Grotesk — updated with horiziontal cut-offs. That post-war modernist graphic designers adopted Helvetica in lock step instead of, say, Syntax, may have been the first sign that the dogma of the religion was beginning to unravel.

Americans typically don’t approach design with either theory or ideology. So it was a great relief to hear James Mosely’s talk on “Vernacular Letters of the 18th Century.” Mosely was the longtime curator of St. Bride’s Library, London’s printing museum, and by carefully studying every bit of paper the St. Bride’s had collected and remembering it all. He is the world’s expert on the fantastic explosion of commercial lettering and type design that coincided with the Industrial Revoltion, both of which Britain led. He has not confined his interest to printing types, and has gone on to explore all the ways letters are used, from engraving to sign painting to stone carving.

In an earlier session, Mosely convincingly challenged some of Stone’s points in an interesting lecture about the development of the geometric monotone sans serif capitals in ancient times, and then again when William Caslon cast the first sans serif typeface in 1816. Stone suggested that Calson developed them as a logical simplification of classical models, much the way Johston did, Mosley pointed to lapidary examples in Greece, carved well before the Roman Empire came to be. Mosely has shown how London architects in the 18th century followed some of these early sans models on neo-classical buildings, several decades before Caslon’s “Egyptian.”

Their clash was a small token of the schism between the Spencerian and Chancery camps.

Mosely, in his own talk, had nothing negative to say about Johnston or the hegemony of the broad-nibbed pen in the 20th century. Rather he showed that if a little more knowledge of letterform history had been applied to some famous historical restoration projects in Britain, the results would have been more correct, strong and satisfying.

Most memorable is the number on the door of No. 10 Downing St. If you look at photographs of that door in Churchill’s time, there was a fat little 10 — robust “modern” numerals probably dating back to the Edwardian style that was popular when the door was first painted.

But when the house was rebuilt after the War, the Ministry of Works re-painted a rather weaker number, with the strokes stressed at the angle of Imperial Rome rather than Imperial Britain.

Why?

Edward Johnston.

Nor does anyone who uses the The Times as an example of what Murdoch can do bother to recall that the paper had a string of somewhat patchy, if titled, owners. The founding family, the Walters, sold the paper in 1908 to Alfred Harmsworth, who became Lord Northcliffe. I remember reading in a the paper’s own history of its owners, published the day after the Murdoch sale: “In his latter years Lord Northcliffe was not in his right mind.” This may explain the paper’s embrace in 1920 of the improbable and sickeningly anti-Semetic forgery, “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” which The Times never really lived down. Two years later Northcliffe’s heirs sold to, gasp, a foreign-born owner, John Jacob Astor V, who became Lord Astor of Hever and who in the 1930s supported Chamberlain and appeasement. In 1966 the Astors sold to another foreigner, Roy Herbert Thomson, who became Baron Thomson of Fleet only after he gave up his Canadian citizenship (a precedent for Lord Black). The Thomson organization took the drastic step of running news on the front page (instead of ads), but with increasing labor problems, including a long strike at The Times in 1979, they sold it to Murdoch, along with the Sunday Times, which was still run separately.

The Times had long ceased to be the newspaper of record in Britain, but one would gather from recent comparisons that Murdoch’s run was at the same level of cultural depredation as the Rape of the Sabine Women. An objective view of the history suggests otherwise. Left on the course set by these various peers of the realm, The Times would have sunk by 1990 without Murdoch. Some readers may resent the end of the honorifics in the text, or the small space left for the Court Calendar, and I doubt the Queen gets her daily limited edition printed on 100-rag stock, but they do still get a newspaper. And the web site’s recent redesign indicates the dear old thing may survive a bit longer.

Moreover, Fleet Street is largely rid of unions, allowing the great pillar of the left, The Guardian, to pay market rates for journalists and pressmen. (And of course London is rid of Fleet Street, except as a good place for real estate investment, since Rupert moved his newspapers to Wapping in 1986).

No one is saying that the Wall Street Journal would perish soon without Murdoch, but the Journal was on the same glidepath as The Times of London. Once the financial markets and the advertisers decide that you are toast, you are done. And whether or not one can project a future raison d’être for newspapers — on paper or in some convenient digital format — there is no guarantee that any of them will survive the transition. Sentiment is over. E.W. Scripps recently pulled the plug on its hometown daily, The Post, just as Hearst scuttled granddaddy’s flagship, The Examiner.

Murdoch is quiet about his plans, but there it is widely assumed that he will rethink the paper’s roll as one of the three big national dailies, and put new energy into the web site. It doesn’t make much sense to expand the coverage of non-business news, as has been suggested, since the web is filled with wire stories of all kinds. More astute business reporting would probably have more success, starting with a fresh look at Wall Street itself.

Newspapers will not pull out of this mortal glidepath until they get a lot more interesting. This is something that Rupert has understood, presumably from birth. His attitude has always been to damn the institutions and give people what they like. This is what worked for Hearst and Pulitizer, and for Paley and Sarnoff. But today the traditional media polar bears (in newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, music, movies and books) seldom blame the product for their shrinking habitat.

Rupert, like the historical founders of media empire, knows the location of the trigger on this instrument, and he is not a afraid to use it. I was his employee for a couple of years starting in 1978, and, while I won’t indulge in the smarmy anecdotes some defenders have told in recent days (which remind me of Peter Cook’s character, E.L. Whisty, describing Hitler as a “marvelous ballroom dancer”), the fact is that even after 50 years, Rupert gets his people moving. I figured back 25 years ago that he had the names of 2,000 managers in his head at all times, and if he had an idea that might be useful, he would pick up the phone and call one of them. (And if it was the middle of the night in your time zone, you woke up fast.) Now, perhaps, he sends e-mail, and one has to admire the way he picked up MySpace, and . . . China.

These strategic moves were not done without early trials. Few remember the narrow-band portal Murdoch closed without fanfare in the late ’90s (I can’t even remember its name), nor his stinging criticism of China’s restrictions of freedom of speech, which scotched a satellite TV venture. But he kept thinking and kept going.

So, let’s not waste a lot of time wringing our hands about the Wall Street Journal. Murdoch is its best hope. And, if anyone can turn around the news business, he can.

*    *    *

Don’t think that this is a pitch for a design job. I already tried that—in 1973. Rupert was starting The National Star, and I sent off a package of samples of my tabloid pages. I got a nice note back from the editor, saying that he and Mr. Murdoch and had looked at my work, but decided that the style was rather too “classy” for what they had in mind. I should have framed that letter.

We get cool web sites where you can’t find anything; cool magazines that you can’t read; cool automobiles that you can’t figure out how to turn on the ignition.

At the bottom of Condé Nast Portfolio’s home page right now you’ll find an exercise unintentionally dedicated to the notion that design is simply a trivial coating over a product.

A former New York Times and Reuters hand, Zubin Jelveh takes on the Bloomberg terminal. He notes that the boxes themselves were nicely redesigned a couple of years ago by Antenna Design. “But the displays,” he writes, “still look like MS-DOS.”

Actually, not. “The Bloomberg” goes back to the command-line interface of the mini era. The first displays were monochrome — black and amber. The fonts were bitmaps. Users typed in mnemonic codes to move around the system — and then hit a green “Go” button. Customers were traders in the financial markets. The Bloomberg was optimized for Michael Bloomberg’s old colleagues in the pits, whose well-being depended on getting the right information to make a buy or sell before the next guy.

All you have to do is watch a currency trader follow the movement and color changes in the Bloomberg cross-currency chart, to realize that these customers are not interested in sharpness, accuracy and speed. Not “cool.”

As the system developed over the last 26 years, news feeds were added, then original stories. The display became color. The real-time graphics added enhanced color-coded tables and 3D. Bloomberg skipped DOS altogether and moved to Windows, but the interface with all its short-cut commands remained the same, just faster. Customers in the trading pits count business advantages in seconds. And Bloomberg has gotten 275,000 subscribers, at $1,900 a month, by listening to what they want. (Aside: If you figure a 15 percent EBITDA, Mike Bloomberg’s month draw, if he took it, is more than $50 million. How many month’s income would it take him to run for President?)

The point is, the thing is working like nothing else on the planet. Sure there are improvements that could be made (reportedly, ClearType fonts are on the way), and the IT department is a little like the Russian coders in the movie Space Cowboys, but I would hate to be the CEO who ordered a big redesign, only to look down from my fabulous office in the fabulous Cesar Pelli building with the fabulous Paul Scher graphics to see a mob of angry Wall Street customers brandishing torches.

*    *    *

The Portfolio exercise ignores this customer base and the details of the Bloomberg product. Jelveh called up three design firms and asked asked them to do what was described on the home page as a “fantasy makeover” of the Bloomberg: thehappycorp (now that’s branding), Ziba Design and Ideo. You can see them in a nicely designed pop-up gadget that you get to from the story page.

Thehappycorp’s effort looks good at first, but much of it is taken by a direct (credited) quote from Marcos Wescamp’s Newsmap, a headline cloud based on Google News. Brilliant, perhaps, but not quite the thing you want to puzzle over while you’re trying to figure the exact trajectory right this minute of bond yields.

Ideo, as might be expected, does a very creditable job. The screens are now white, and a caption reads, “The white background causes less eye-fatigue than the current design’s black background.”

Is this true? Doesn’t a field of white on a flat screen tend to glare? Isn’t legibility simply a function of contrast and edge definition? Jelveh brings in the experts: Elliott Malkin, who is described as an information architect at The New York Times, and Jacob Nielsen, the Grey Wizard of Information Architecture.

Like Malkin, Nielsen points to the use of color, suggesting that dark text on a light background is easier on the eyes than the reverse. (On the Web, Bloomberg has decided to use black text on a white background for its news stories.)

White backgrounds are a matter of convention. We are used to seeing black type on white in print, so we are comfortable with web sites that are black and white, but I find myself turning down the brightness if reading a long text. (Another aside: Please, no more comments about our red background. It was a stunt to make this same point.)

I know something about the Bloomberg web site redesign, although by contract I can’t say why, and the decision to use black backgrounds on the index pages and white on the landing pages was based on convention. The black says Bloomberg, but the web site is aimed at everyone except Bloomberg customers. Once they get into it, the black, it was thought, the black would seem quirky and annoying. As Matthew Carter says, readability is 90 percent familiarity. . . .

The last fantasy makeover was from Ziba, which went for black minimalism. Thin, but nice, until you read: “Ziba replaces the keyboard with a circular puck-like tablet that integrates visual and tactile interaction.” The iDrive comes to the Bloomberg!

*    *    *

Design is not just style, it’s problem solving. This exercise may be interesting and impressive on the surface, but good design must work beneath the surface. The approach here is a little like the ad agency practice of delivering the whole creative strategy at the first meeting. It’s as though design is simply an intuitive — artistic — process that requires more inspiration than knowledge.

This is why I won’t participate in design “bake-offs,” like the one recently held at Fortune magazine. Nor do I do speculative presentations. To be successful, a redesign of the graphic system that produces a newspaper, a magazine or a web site, must be based on real knowledge of the product the brand, the staff, the resources and the audience. Intuition has a big role, but if momma sent you to design school because you showed some artistic talent, you probably got an unpleasant awakening at your first job.

Design ain’t art. And Bloomberg doesn’t have to look cool. It is cool.

Architects and engineers work differently from ad agencies. They do research and compile a brief to define a problem. The client may then choose from alternative solutions — but the solutions are all based on a shared understanding of the problem.

The three talented design firms (agencies?) engaged by Portfolio, cannot have really understood what Bloomberg is all about. And as Portfolio is intended for “business leaders,” this effort can only reinforce the tendency of decision-makers to think of design as so much window-dressing. Or as the late Richard Mitchell, the writer of the well-designed “Underground Grammarian,” gratingly put it, “Design is not an essential. Design is only an interesting particular.”

They’re still doing this. The Houston Chronicle has a big front-page blurb, “What's on Chron.com.” But when you go to Chron.com, it”s really hard to find anything about the printed Chronicle. (I single out my friends in Houston because I helped design both the paper and the web site, and I've tried to make this point with them directly.)

On their web site, there is nothing about the print edition on the home page except a little subscription link on the footer. If go to the bottom of the News page, and there just above the lottery number link is, “Today’s Front Page.” that gives you a PDF file, laconically titled, “p1.pdf”.

At The New York Times, and many others, there is still a whole section organized like the printed paper, entitled, Today’s Paper, and reached via the top nav bar on the home page. It not only shows an image of the front page — they show you a low-res image where you can’t read the text, presumably so you’ll go to Starbucks and buy a paper. (The Times doesn’t think that you know about the Newseum’s high-res file.)

I like “Today’s Paper” because it show the editors’ news judgement at a particular moment (usually 5:00pm the previous day.) On the web site, breaking news often takes over, and it is harder to sense the importance of the stories, just as it is on TV. Last Friday it was the bomb scare in London. That day the web editors held on to the papers’ lead stories (the court integration decision at the Times and Biggio’s 3,000th hit at the Chronicle), but often the truly important sutff is bumped for breaking news, like on TV.

The folks at Chron.com say that their audience is now substantially different from that of the printed edition. Something like 20 percent of the site’s uniques also see the paper at least occasionally. But that is only another reason to promote the paper. It may be that out-of-towners can’t get the Chronicle at Starbucks, but the authority of the brand comes from the increasingly interesting mix of stories in the paper. I see it mostly passing through the Houston airport, or at my sister’s house when I stop over, and I really think it is now the best daily outside of the big nationals, after the Washington Post. The news audience on the web is ranking it up there, too. As is Google News, according to Newsknife, which provides this list for the year to June:

No.1 sources

1. New York Times
2. Houston Chronicle
3. Washington Post
4. Voice of America
5. Times Online, UK
6. Forbes

Home page sources

1. New York Times
2. Houston Chronicle
3. Washington Post
4. Voice of America
5. Bloomberg
6. International Herald Tribune, France

Home page + 10 sub-pages

1. Guardian Unlimited
2. Forbes
3. Houston Chronicle
4. ABC News
5. CBS News
6. New York Times

So I don’t think it would hurt if they would push the print product a bit, after 10 years of the tide going the other way. The printed edition is, after all, still paying for the newsroom — but the papers, shoved to the wall by an unholy combination of stock analysts and media buyers, need all the help they can get.

Until we get a digital version of a newspaper that is as handy as the printed product (The New York Times Reader comes closest) it would be great to see how they are presenting the news. And it would be a good idea, as the web grows and the print circulation shrinks, if they offered some things you can’t get without subscription, “Times Select”. Maybe the crossword puzzle is online, in print. Or certain comics. Or, if Rupert gets his way with the Journal, the WSJ Sweepstakes.

If there was a such a magic hole, it'd be built into the operating systems of today's computers, or browsers would have them, or the internet itself would take care of the problem. To take an outline of a letter, logo or graphic, and "decide" what would be the best pixels to remove, and where precisely to add pixels to create a "sharper" image for a particular use for any user, of any font in any computer — what a great thing!

But "a particular use" has a range of possible appearances through the combination of operating systems, browsers, languages, scripts, and screen displays, with user preferences sprinkled throughout, before reaching the url to be seen and becoming those pixels that form letters. And though the typographic can be made to work uniformly sharp in a consistent user environment like a corporate intranet, taking type to the world at large with sharpness and fidelity is another thing.

I've had thread encounters where I hear one user complain bitterly about fuzzy blurry type, while another user lauds the same type at the same url — only to find, that one sits at a machine with 144 dots per inch while the other is sitting with a CRT. The range of display possibilities for typographic material in the real world now has become vast; from MacOS7 to Leopard, DOS to Vista, 72 dpi to 220, millions of fonts and billions of users and most of it is various kinds of fuzzy.

But what is sharpness to begin with? In print, over the last 200 or so years, sharpness is taken for granted, i.e. the physical edges are "sharp" between what's printed and what's not, or between one color and another. Only in the days before real paper, in today's cheep flyers, grunge style design or badly registered news printing do we see fuzziness or blurriness in print. So what's with these screens, these fonts, these screen font makers?

In the early years of the internet, graphic designers complained bitterly about having to manage the quality of their web type in Photoshop as a graphic. They set the type, it didn't look good, they went to work pixel editing and were not pleased. Everyone knew why: Photoshop didn't even kern type, and if you were a dedicated pro you'd be doing that kerning anyways in your larger sizes of type, so what's a few pixels in the smaller uses of type. . . . That wasn't it, though, it was type designers who wouldn't make their fonts right that caused it all.

Despite the resistance to quality thus posed by type designers, graphic designers learned to maximize the contrast, make the letters repeat and space well, (by bitmap font editing), and this sharpening was passed on to the next generation of graphic designers as an entry level web design position. Some learned that you could put the type in different locations on a Photoshop page, get different pixels result, cut & paste the letters around to get a good word or two, and be done faster.

Designers also learned that you could use TrueType fonts, in fact many fonts bundled with operating systems composed TT typographically sharp in HTML, so you could skip Photoshop if you didn't mind limited typographic expression. Only some TT fonts worked well and this number really never grew much. With unlimited typographic expression as one of the underlying conditions of free enterprise, sharp unlimited typographic expression over a broad network of users is an issue now facing free enterprise users en masse.

Sharpness of type is a thing relative to a lot of variables. But what is clear is that the options font developers have, and thus the options font users have, are limited by a feudal attitude towards type technology. Who isn't fuzziness a problem for? The way this sharpness of type worked out is that the big font software developers: Adobe, Microsoft and Apple made fonts fuzzy for free to make things easier for themselves, each for different reasons.

If one uses pdfs, the use includes zooming, so one can adjust fuzziness by zooming the type bigger, perhaps fine tuning their view by moving back slightly, or by zooming the type smaller and moving forward, one can at least change the fuzz. Microsoft, has so many solutions to so many options, it's impossible to tell all the reasons it's types are not sharp. Apple has been following Adobe's lead on the Mac (except without zooming), sharpening some fonts for their OS and personal devices by hand tuning.

So, all of the solutions exist in outline font design (see link on RB.com), hinting (see MS/typography), or bitmap editing (see yourself doing so soon), to make everything sharp all the time and the only thing standing in the way right now is delivery. During discussion of yet another sadly inadequate embedding scheme, as in, something that just wants to call the name of a font, and not tell anything else about what the user's need's are, someone from "guess where?" said I just wanted better embedding 'cause I want more $$$$$! or was it $$$$$$$$$, I forget.

Well, properly specified embeddable fonts are the hole into which fuzzy fonts can be put and sharpened. Any fonts will work, any type designer can make them, any url can call them, and if only one more user can see them, and read them, well, isn't that worth it? It'd also, by the way, cause a market to open to competition for me, and anyone else willing to study the issues and technologies, design well, and work hard, which is more often than not, not the way things are now between user and type design provider.

This study on Cleartype vs. Bitmaps... "Subpixel addressing is a font-rendering technology that triples the apparent horizontal resolution of liquid crystal displays."

Sit human beings down with the same font and text in the same point size and composition, and get a majority to say there was no apparent difference in the resolution between 96 dpi and 288 dpi monitors... did they?

"Taken together, these findings suggest that subpixel addressing provides substantial benefits to users while adding no costs to display hardware."

Taken, however from the truth in the field, from the originators of many ClearType fonts, and in all practical typographic practice aimed at products for reading and writing type, 120 dpi is the lowest resolution arguably, that users are clearly better served with GreyScale or ClearType rendering as it is...144 dpi is the first uncontested resolution at which all users will be satisifed exclusively by subpixel rendering to the smallest sizes, and that happens regardless of underlying "technology" i.e. at 144 dpi "greyscale" will be the thing users choose, because it adds no color at any size when defining what should be by definition, a monochrome definition.

At 96 dpi, the market is now fragmented between ad hoc, greyscale, B&W and ClearType, with browsers offering various interfaces to "the font" one can choose, so, although this 96 dpi clot is adding no costs to display hardware, they are spending much more time figuring out what they need to do to read and write, this and that comfortably.

And also, we have a fresh surveyor in over at Filipe Fortes' Web site.

I like this for several reasons; It goes beyond the butterflies I collected of Cool, Clear and Quartz types, and it uses some other fonts. It shows a good understanding of the "color" issue, as I explored in an early thread on RogerBlack.com, but with a lapse in proper terminology, I guess, assigns terms like "readability", and "winner" quite lightly.

This: "The lack of subpixel positioning destroys the serif font at small sizes"... Must be some kind of misunderstanding I don't understand. If serif fonts were subpixel positioned at small sizes, the design would not be destroyed, being the implication? http://typophile.com/node/33005 contains a demonstration of serif cleartype, some of which is re-selfpublished here. [Serif Comp.] [Bin & Bang].

The left specimen is careful to every pixel and sub pixel in the direction of reading, the right is what happens to the same contour "Naturally Rendered" as fonts made for ClearType are, which is not in control of every single pixel and sub pixel in the x direction. I'm not really interested in the "readability" of the other technologies mentioned if they simply do ad hoc rendering in x or y, as they depend on resolution or pixel-precise contour alignment in the design stage for quality readability to be possible. (The specimens at fortes.com make a "read" impossible by fading at the end of each line of every specimen, so perhaps they are instead intended for "a look", instead.)

I discussed the san serif color issue down to earth on RogerBlack.com — One either has control over text color via variation technology or lots of drawing as I show (or both ), or one goes to publish with the text one gets from whatever rasterizer/font combo(s) one uses. This is a limitation in several ways to be thought about. Nevertheless, the "winners" listed at fortes.com are poor in readability, I think, for a reason I excerpt from an essay, "Meme, Myself and i-no-dot": "...in a 'sans' for 'text readability' at 'economical sizes' the [i-no-dot] description is: 'optically appropriate' 'lowercase' 'straight stem (foreground)' followed by 'optically appropriate 'inter-character' 'lowercase' straight space' (ground) , 'optically appropriately reduced' from 'lowercase n' 'intra-character straight space'."

So, if that's the basis for an i-no-dot that can be read in text, and I strongly believe that it is, then how do you define a winner with an "i" like this one; [illustration: the winners are] On the bottom, as illustrated in a clip from fortes.com, the "winner" lost me. I know, I'm picky, but pickiness I can tell you, is spreading as fast as the type fog that is trying to envelope it. If a technology makes an i, an el an I or a 1 into a blur at any size above 8, without beginning or end, it's ad hoc.

Letting fortes.com go on: "Considering the lack of cross-browser font-embedding, this probably isn't a problem for most." The cross-browser font-embedding scheme being offered for donation, and Roger's blog title are the last issues of this entry, "Now if it would only rain" Roger says, but to add water, I mean; "Now if it would only rain water" might be best. For years I've wanted a way to silently and skillfully embed fonts in web content, primarily for text. Now, with the current state of fragmentation on rendering, hints, line layout and embedding, it's not such a nice kind of rain.

“Flash and PDF just take the font outlines and blur them (like Photoshop) to make the edges less jaggy.”

These applications and technologies don’t simply “take the font outlines and blur them,” however they do use oversampling, which renders the text at a larger size and filters it, in combination with hinting. I admit that text in Flash used to be rather poor in older versions, but text is important to us and we continue to improve in this area. We introduced a new type engine in Flash Player 8 (released August 2005) to improve text fidelity, and it leans towards preserving the aesthetic of the text.

“They ignore TrueType hints that can make better letterspacing, consistent letterforms, at sharper body type on the screen. ClearType fonts use hints that work at the sub-pixel level, using the three colors of the screen, red, green and blue.”

To clarify for folks, fonts don’t come with special sub-pixel level hints—it’s the rendering that works at the sub-pixel-level. Also, I’d like to separate out Acrobat and Flash Player since Adobe and Macromedia recently merged and the products aren’t using the same technologies.

Acrobat’s CoolType, like ClearType, discards some of the hints and uses the ones it thinks will work well with its special rendering approach. PDF rendering achieves sharpness by using non-linear shaping of glyphs. This means that it has minimal distortion and generally has high-quality inter-glyph spacing. There is also a "Smooth Text for LCD Screens" setting in Acrobat/Reader that is, unfortunately, turned off by default. With smoothing on for both CRTs and LCDs, we use font hinting as well as sharpening of edges, both horizontal and vertical effects. This is the same general approach to sub-pixel rendering that ClearType uses.

In Flash Player, the rendering technology doesn’t use the original hints in the font, but converts the outlines to its internal format, and then applies auto-hinting to the result. The options are under the developer’s control - so again we need to do more here to make sure folks know how to create more readable text. On Windows, if you use the default text—device text—it is ClearType (if you have it enabled on the system) so text in Flash Player should look exactly like all other system-generated text in desktop applications and the browser. Also, if font smoothing is enabled for Windows, the sub-pixel rendering is on by default. When using embedded fonts, sub-pixel rendering is used when the developer enables “publish for readability” and you also get the benefit of consistency across platforms.

We’d love to hear more about your experiences with PDF and Flash text and understand how to make it easier to create high quality, high fidelity text experiences with Adobe technologies.