 |
||||||
 |
||||||
Wisdom of Fonts
Ron Reason belongs to a guild so small that even though he’s the assistant managing editor in charge of redesigning the Sun-Times, he’s simultaneously doing the same sort of work for the rival Tribune Company. Visit his Web site and you’ll find him philosophizing, promoting himself, showing off his handiwork, recruiting staff, and saying what he thinks about the papers he works for. Editor Nigel Wade brought him to the Sun-Times. And when the Sun-Times announced that two new editors—Michael Cooke and John Cruick-shank—would be taking over for Wade this month, Reason reacted publicly. “For the first time, I get to experience what many of my colleagues who have been here have gone through numerous times—changes in top newsroom leadership and the potential uncertainty it brings,” he wrote in his on-line “diary.” But he expected to see “eye to eye” with the new men. “These are strong advocates of visual journalism and great reporting in general,” he went on. “They bring lots of strong traditional values to the table, but also new ideas and enthusiasm to help reinvent a newspaper, and staff, that needs a bit of a kick in the butt.” Does it? Reason went on, “(That’s the exact challenge that brought me here last year, so forgive me if I feel a little bit like the cavalry has arrived.) Up to this point, a common lament in our newsroom was that it will never change.” Reason’s diary at www.ronreason.com finds him fretting about much more than type fonts. Another day, Reason called the Sun-Times “the newsroom that time forgot.” He reminisced about the environment he’d once encountered at the Saint Petersburg Times—“where writers, editors, and visual folk work together as equal partners”—and bluntly declared, “For a variety of reasons, this culture didn’t exist at the Sun-Times.” Reason told me the other day that the question he’d ask himself is “Why would you come to one of the most challenged papers in the country?” Is it? “In some respects, it’s one of the most challenged I’ve seen anywhere in the world,” he said, “in terms of trying to figure out what they want to be and how to do what they want to do. The Boston paper was a much worse looking paper, but internally, the challenges here are much worse....I’ve generally described progress at the Sun-Times as ten steps forward and eight steps back.” Eight steps? He named one, and it was a dandy. He and his design team had been trying to spruce up the pullout Wednesday food section. They thought they were making headway. But a few weeks ago a “big corporate decision” was made to drop a half-page ad onto the front page. Look for it. It’s classic Hollinger buck-snatching opportunism, and it made the food section hideous. Before coming to the Sun-Times as a consultant in 1998, Reason created a new look for the Boston Herald. Like the Sun-Times, the Herald had been a Rupert Murdoch tabloid; in fact, Murdoch owned it until 1994. But because the Herald was always down-market and proud of it, Murdoch had less to change in Boston than in Chicago to make his acquisition comport with his grotesque theories of what lumpen America goes for in a tab. The new owners “wanted to assert they were different” from Murdoch, Reason told me, “but in terms of the physical look, there was no desire to make it into a mini-Boston Globe.” The Herald’s “gritty, streetwise feel” was something to hang on to. The Sun-Times is a different case. Murdoch cursed it with his touch, and 14 years after he let go the curse has not been lifted. “I had someone in the advertising community ask the other day if the Sun-Times was still owned by Rupert Murdoch,” Reason told me. He said he wants to translate the Herald’s “provocative dramatic texture” to the Sun-Times. But the look of the paper must strongly assert what Chicago still hasn’t clearly grasped—that the Australian has left the building. “I’ll say one thing about my experience with the Sun-Times,” said Reason. “I know just about everybody who’s anybody in newspaper design, and I know very few people who would have come to this paper—and I don’t know anybody who would have stayed with the paper knowing what we’ve gone through. It’s definitely an exercise in optimism and faith.” When Reason arrived in 1998 he told himself, “This is chaos.” He found “too many fonts, too many weird logos,” and he discovered that “there was not one focused point in the paper’s history where it knew what its design was.” After getting to know the department heads, he concluded that he’d joined a paper beaten down by a succession of owners and editors and that a woebegone appearance was visual evidence of that beating. There’d been a redesign in 1983, but Murdoch took over in ’84 and overnight changed everything. Then Murdoch sold the paper to a new owner, who overnight changed some things back, and then that owner was dumped by his investors, who eventually sold the paper to Hollinger. Helvetica, the preferred typeface, “had a dated feel, sort of a 70s feel.” But Helvetica was a forgiving typeface, Reason explained—it didn’t smear on the old presses the way more elegant faces would. “Nigel, to his credit, from the moment he came in, was never satisfied with the design of the paper,” Reason told me. And as the paper brings its new offset presses on-line, it’s finally free to pick whatever fonts it pleases and to dress up. We won’t see the redesigned paper until late summer, but Reason and his design team have already been making piecemeal changes. “We got rid of a lot of ugly typefaces. We’ve cleared up the paper to where it’s bland but not offensive.” Was it offensive?
|
