Last weekend, passing by my local news stand, I was shocked to see something on the cover of the Sunday edition of the Toronto Star (one of Toronto’s major dailies): HUGE TYPE! The Star, which generally has some pretty strong photography, decided to go with a purely typographic ‘illustration’ for their cover story, filling the entire front page with big, insulting, words (in giant curly quotes no less!). I couldn’t resist picking it up!
The story itself was, in my humble opinion, a rather uninteresting account of why the rest of Canada hates Toronto (trust me, we know). A rather weak piece to merit front page coverage given the current situation in the world, but the cover treatment showed a suprising editorial flexibility in what is a pretty strict, rule-driven medium. Both of these factors (the weakness and flexibility) can in part be accounted for by the paper being a weekend edition which is generally supposed to be more ‘fun’, but this type of treatment seems unprecedented, at least since the turn of the century. I could very well be wrong here, and would be curious to see if there are any other contemporary examples out there.
The typography itself is pretty well done, everything seems well kerned and the overall texture of the page holds together. I’m not sure what fonts are used, but they’re consistent with the rest of the paper and probably proprietary to the Star. The bold, sans-serif is interesting, with a tail on the upper case “u”, and playful, slightly rounded terminals. Overall I felt that the composition was effective I suppose, but not exactly memorable. In the end it’s a bunch of words on a page, and try as I might to read deeper into the placement, treatment and contrasts of the words, I didn’t come up with much.
Nonetheless upon first seeing it, I was awestruck. I thought, “this is daring, what ramifications could this have? Is this a signal of a more sophisticated reader? Is it acknowledgment that design can tell a story as well as a photograph or illustration? Will we see this approach extended into truly interesting typographic approaches, using fonts from Emigre and influenced by Russian constructivists? Is this the beginning of a resurgence of concrete poetry, breaking into the mainstream? Could I actually make a career out of this typo-journalism?”
Sadly, more likely than not, this is just a blip in the radar. It screams for attention and does it well in the photographic landscape of newspaper covers. But in a way, I see it more as a cry for attention than anything else. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, this is a daily newspaper, and for the amount of time the designer probably had (especially after a good deal of time spent haggling with the editors I presume), they did a decent job. After all, they made me smile, and that’s something the news does very rarely these days…
The Star introduced a radical redesign of their Sunday edition on Jan. 16. They're calling it a "maga-paper" with the "soul of a magazine, heart of a newspaper." It's a bold experiment that is being watched closely in the industry, especially in the States, where Sunday circulation has been in a disconcerting downward spiral lately.
Not to be so crass as to pimp my own weblog, but you can read (and see) more here and here.
On Feb.09.2005 at 01:00 AM