The Washington Post published an Edmund Arnold obituary Friday.

Through recent years, Mr. Arnold remained a vital, sometimes curmudgeonly force, speaking out for the frustrated average reader who tried to understand editorial judgments -- and misjudgments.

“The front-page images on our newspaper are becoming so big that they don’t attract the reader, they attract the looker,” he told a Society for News Design publication in 2000. “And they often don’t work because the broadsheet page is folded so you only see half of it in the news rack. We are over-designing, and we are over-coloring, so what the reader is confronted by is a three-ring circus. Who do I watch? The bareback riders, the weightlifter or the jugglers?”

He also disliked placing advertisements on the front page, an act he likened to NASCAR drivers who resemble “walking billboards.”

Update: And The New York Times ran an obit by Steven Heller in Monday's paper. It includes an excellent photo by Josh Meltzer of The Roanoke Times.

(Thanks, Denny!)

>Edmund Arnold, 93; Designed Newspapers [The Washington Post]
>Edmund C. Arnold, Bold Newspaper Designer, Dies at 93 [The New York TImes]