Friday, January 21, 2011

Hubs | Say hello to your new, uniform typeface

You're going to see a whole lot of it, I've been told, when virtually all Gannett's U.S. community newspapers adopt the serif face early this year for body copy text in the rollout of the five Design Studio page production hubs.

Typographer Matthew Carter created Olympian in 1970. The Linotype company says: "After the Second World War, the Ionic style replaced Modern Face as the favored typeface for newsprint. A couple decades later, it was in turn replaced by the next generation of newspaper fonts, a mix of Old Face, Transitional and Modern Face forms. Olympian font itself tends toward the Old Face style but is nevertheless an example of this new generation, a result of a time of change and experimentation."

The san-serif Frutiger face, meanwhile, will make frequent appearances in bylines, jump lines, and other secondary roles. Frutiger, according to Wikipedia, "is a sans-serif typeface by the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger. It was commissioned in 1968 by the newly built Charles De Gaulle International Airport at Roissy, France, which needed a new directional sign system. Instead of using one of his previously designed typefaces like Univers, Frutiger chose to design a new one. The new typeface, originally called Roissy, was completed in 1975 and installed at the airport the same year."

8 comments:

  1. I want Hobo and Arnold Böecklin.

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  2. Looks good to me. Just asking, why is this an issue?

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  3. Not an issue, per se. It's news.

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  4. It may not be an issue. But it is an indication that the talk about how centralized workflow would not compromise each paper's uniqueness was all BS.

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  5. Bingo 6:49. Just one of many lies to come.

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  6. The biggest lie is that any of this will reverse Gannett's fortunes. Stupid people, including many employees, are still falling for that one.

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  7. Sites have been told which fonts to use, what point size, etc. This is due to going to the design centers.

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  8. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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