Peter Palazzo, the art director whose redesign of the Sunday New York Herald Tribune in 1963 helped to create the discipline of newspaper design, died at 78 on Jan. 30.

Steven Heller writes in today's New York Times:

In 1963, when Mr. Palazzo was hired to reformat the foundering Sunday edition of The Tribune, most newspapers were rigidly, and often blandly, composed by editors who were not trained as designers or art directors. Originally an advertising designer, Mr. Palazzo was asked to create a typographic format that would distinguish The Tribune from its competitors. He broke with tradition when he combined newspaper layout principals and magazine display presentation, including larger images, increased white space, and elegant headline composition.

It was a calculated risk.

"One must be very careful about tampering" with the readers' habits, "which have built up over a long period of time," he wrote in 1964 in Print magazine. But since The Tribune had been steadily losing Sunday circulation to The New York Times, Jim Bellows, editor of The Tribune, took a chance that Mr. Palazzo's concept to design all the Sunday sections for "individual identification and unified appearance" would transform the archaic-looking pages into something modern that would attract new readers.

On the front page, Mr. Palazzo replaced the conventional news stories, set in monotonous narrow columns, with a summary of world, national and local events in a wide column of type with bold subheading down the left side of the page. Wider columns and gutters (the spaces between columns) throughout the paper made it more legible compared with the tightly packed eight columns of type in The New York Times of that era.

Mr. Palazzo used only one typeface, Caslon, because "of the instant impression of integrity it gives to the news," he wrote. The photographs were also noticeably larger. The new modular design was so airy that readers initially complained that they could not take it seriously. But prefiguring responses to today's information glut, The Tribune's design provided readers with signposts that guided them through the paper.

In his book "The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune," Richard Kluger writes of the 1963 remake:

Until then, most newspaper editors' idea of page design began and ended with the question "Where shall we put the picture?" The new Sunday Tribune was conceived as a graphic totality, rendered with the precision of superior magazine advertising design. Each page reflected what the Columbia Journalism Review, in a favorable assessment of the restyled paper, called "painstaking 'packaging'" Type was massed and set off by white space almost scandalously generous for newsprint pages to create what the newly hired design editor, Peter Palazzo, called "an environment of visibility." Illustrations of unprecedented sizes, shapes, and originality, closely integrated with the text instead of mere window dressing, helped generate visual impact without sacrifice of clarity or dignity.