Newsdesigner.com | The “Ransom Note” Times

The “Ransom Note” Times

9:44 AM, March 24, 2007

So everybody’s linking to this cartoonist guy who’s harshing on the LA Times’ typography (scroll down).

Beginners who get their hands on a computer for the first time are usually fascinated by fonts, and produce documents that look like ransom notes. If your church newsletter looks like a ransom note, you can be sure that it was designed by the pastor's sister-in-law on her new Macintosh. So it is with the Times' front page.

So I was gonna point out that dude’s grasp on typography is a bit tenuous and that his own web page is hardly a model of typographic restraint. But my colleague Quentin Lueninghoener went ahead and did a much better job.

Update: Robert Landry, design director of the Los Angeles Business Journal, steps to the defense of the Times at LA Observed, and you can read many opinions about the redesign in the comments of the posts I made after the new design launched last October here and here.

Comments

Heads up: After you hit "post" things may be slow and you may get an error. Most likely, your comment did post. Apologies. I'm looking for a fix.

1) The guy doesn't know what he's talking about and Quentin Lueninghoener thankfully pointed that out. My newspaper has more than 50 type treatment styles and only 3 main fonts (one of which is strictly for body text), so it's really not that uncommon.

2) Also The LAT must ask itself (from a reader's perspective), what is the function of all the different treatments? Yes they act as entry points but how many make sense? Wherever the answer is "it doesn't," the treatment should be eliminated.

When it comes to typography used to navigate a page, it's as simple as that. If your readers don't understand what something means, it's pointless. But if it does make sense - such as the difference between the column's treatment as a whole and a news story's treatment - keep it.

Besides, the LAT still doesn't know why it should care about design "we're the LA Times, we know everything" is kind of the general attitude last time I checked.

Posted by: Mike Higdon at March 25, 2007 6:51 AM

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Posted by: at August 24, 2008 6:15 PM

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