News design

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News design is the arrangement of images and texts on a newspaper or magazine page, in accordance with the editorial and graphic guidelines and goals. While the order of the articles depends on their importance, the appearance, legibility and balance of text and image elements as well as the integration of advertisements also play a role. The result is what is known as the layout . Today, this process takes place within the editorial on the computer ( Full page break ), formerly he was part of the art ( break ).

News design takes the principles of graphic design into account and is a subject as part of journalism training in the USA .

The era of modern newspapers begins in the mid-19th century with the industrial revolution and the growing capacity for newspaper printing and distribution . Since then, improvements in printing technology, graphic design and editorial standards have resulted in a number of improvements in the appearance and readability of newspapers. Nineteenth-century newspapers were very tightly printed, often arranged vertically with a variety of headings for each article . It was not until digital printing and full-page make-up in the 20th century that the appearance of newspapers was decisively changed.

Some changes:

• Fewer items per page
• Fewer but bigger headings
• More picture elements, usually photos, but also often boxes or graphics
• More white space (empty space), also known as "air". A page with too little white space is called "dense" and with too much white space "loose".
• colour

process

Layout artists typically use Desktop Publishing - Software to expand to arrange directly on the page. In the past, prior to digital prepress , designers used " layout dummies " to align the exact layout and elements for each page. A complete layout dummy was needed to determine the exact printing column width at which a typesetter set the font and the text columns.

With the photographic printing process, there was a transition to the adhesive layout, with printing gaps on high-resolution film being glued onto a final exposed print. A negative was then made from these prints with a large production camera - directly onto a steel-coated photographic plate.

Although the adhesive layout put an end to the cumbersome manual set, it still required a planned layout and adjusted printing gap widths. In the mid-1990s, the adhesive layout was replaced by the " computer-to-plate " process, in which computer-made pages were transferred in files directly to the photographic plate. The replacement of some intermediate stages in newspaper production with direct plate make-up allowed much greater flexibility and precision than before.

Design options

Designers and layouters only partially determine the size of the photo and headline, especially in the case of magazines. Otherwise, the editors decide which articles are on which page and where when making full-page breaks. Well-known newspaper designers in the USA are Mario Garcia , Tim Harrower , Ed Hashey , Ron Reason and Robb Montgomery .

Some of the most influential American newspapers that have layout an important role in their editorial offices are the Detroit Free Press , the San Jose Mercury News , the Chicago Sun Times , and the Virginian Pilot . In Germany, Die Zeit , the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) and Der Tagesspiegel have been recognized as Best Designed Newspaper by the Society for Newsdesign .