From the course: Typography and Layout: A Practical Guide

Newspapers

From the course: Typography and Layout: A Practical Guide

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Newspapers

“

- [Instructor] A newspaper is an example of informative reading. Unlike a novel that is read from start to finish, the reader picks and chooses what they find important. For this reason, newspapers should be designed in such a way that they can be scanned quickly. Newspapers need to make efficient use of space. The text is presented in multiple columns and the typefaces used will often be slightly condensed. With limited space, it's important to consistently use headings, subheads, color, and other visual cues to organize and structure the content in a way that's easy for the reader to find and follow the stories that they want to read. In terms of type choice, here are four typefaces that work well on newsprint. All are on Adobe Fonts and we see them here at the same size and same leading, 9 on 10. They all have a moderate weight and a relatively high X-height which is usually considered to aid readability. We see that Times New Roman is the more economical of the four. If we compare their X-heights, I'll select these four frames and then align their bottom edges, we see that Century Old Style has the highest X-height. Without any structure, the newspaper is just a mass of indigestible text. Let's see how in a few steps we can transform this into something much more inviting. I'll select my two text frames and divide them into five columns. Tap W To turn on the guides, select both text frames, introduce some white space by dragging them down from the top margin. On my paste board, I have a headline which I'm going to drag into position. On my layers panel, on a separate layer, I have some pictures or some placeholders, four pictures. These all have text wraps applied to them so that they're pushing the text out of their way. I'll come and select the first paragraph of the text and apply a paragraph style that is predefined to that. This paragraph style is bigger and it spans all of the columns. I have another paragraph style applied throughout the text, but I haven't yet created its definition. This is the subhead. I'll right-click on that to edit it, introduce some contrast by using a different typeface family in a heavier weight at a bigger size. Because the type is bigger, the leading also needs to be bigger. And you can see that where this is applied, with my preview turned on, this is now changing the appearance of the document. I'll come to my indents and spacing and remove any first line indent. I'll add some space before each of these paragraphs, 10 points because that is the leading value that I'm working with and I'll help structure the document by adding in some paragraph rules, a horizontal rule that goes above each of these paragraphs. A half point in white. The color of the rule will be black. I'll check this option. Keep in frame. We don't need to worry too much about that now, but I want that checked. And then I'm going to offset the rule from the text. You can see that the rule is moving up above the text. I'll also come to the character color and change that. One last thing I'd like to do to further structure the document is to select both of these text frames. I've added in some horizontal rules. I'm now going to add in some vertical rules. From the object menu, I'll choose text frame options, column rules, insert column rules, and I just want to make sure that I'm using the same weight as I used for the horizontal rules, a half point. And then I'll just press W to turn off my guides so that we can evaluate the document.

Contents