T4

Swift and traditional newsfaces

"Just as the Swift is a bird that will never eat out of your hand, so Swift is a face with a highly individual character, independent of the conventional norms for newsface design", writes Gerard Unger in this essay from 1988.

Modern technology offers the designer of typefaces for newspapers some fascinating possibilities of adapting a typeface to his own wishes with sophisticated ways of balancing type size, interlinear spacing, character width and the spaces between the letters. There are all sorts of ways of getting away from the traditional columns coarsely stuffed full of holes and lumps. Newspaper type can be more compact, more attractive and more legible, with more emphasis on well-formed lines with pleasing rhythm and few word-breaks. These possibilities can be achieved with most typesetting systems. Quite a lot can even be done to adapt a typeface to individual requirements, or to the technology or style of a newspaper. These modifications are carried out with specialized programs such as Ikarus, after which the modified type can be fed into a typesetting system. The weight and details of text letters can be literally made to measure for use with, for example, a particular printing technique or paper. And titling faces, to take another example, can be modelled to reflect the atmosphere of the newspaper.
   Traditional newsfaces are usually good, solid, heavy types like Excelsior (1931). They are useful, rather than beautiful. They are adapted to enduring such heavy technical ordeals as being cast and set in hot metal, stereotypy (pressing a cardboard matrix to turn a flat printing form into a cylindrical one for a rotary press), and relief printing on coarse paper. Newspapers today are following books and magazines in the change to filmsetting and electronic composition, and to printing in offset. The quality of paper has improved too. In short, types are having an easier time of it in today’s newspapers. So, too, are newspaper designers, since they now have a wider range of typefaces to choose from. They are no longer tied to the special newsfaces, as they were in the past.
   But this does not mean that the production of newspapers is now completely free of all constraints. Paper is and continues to be cheap, presses run faster and faster, and ink is still thin. But it is not only the technical constraints that demand typefaces that are specially attuned to newspapers, rather than any face that happens to catch the designer’s fancy. The content and atmosphere of papers are an even more powerful influence: the news, the multiplicity and multifariousness of reports, tension, speed and ephemerality. Free expression and journalistic independence play a part too. With the increasing attention that is being paid to the design of newspapers, these elements are playing an increasingly important role. The need to link a newspaper with its readers as intimately as possible calls for the greatest possible care in preparing both content and design, right down to the smallest detail.
   To be used in newspapers, letters still have to be good and solid. But there is no longer any excuse for “too much engineering, not enough art” as Harold Evans once characterized the Legibility Group (Ionic, Excelsior, Corona etc). Art can now be given a lot more scope, more attuned to the character of newspapers as a whole and even to the specific character of one particular paper.

Details of newsfaces
Not long ago a speaker at a conference on newspaper design claimed that the choice of body type was a mere detail. Even a cursory count of the quantities of running text in a number of international newspapers is enough to show how wrong he was. Even front pages, where the columns of text often have to give up acres of space to huge photographs and gigantic headlines, are at least a quarter to half full of the paper’s basic ingredient. Hardly a detail!
   On the other hand it is useful to take a careful look at the details of newsfaces. Typefaces differ in the way they treat details. Differences which appear insignificant when you look at individual letters may weigh heavily when hundreds of letters go together to produce the visual impression of a text. A comparison of a new newsface, Swift, with two old faithfuls, Excelsior and Times, shows what details and differences are essential.
   Just as the Swift is a bird that will never eat out of your hand, so Swift is a face with a highly individual character, independent of the conventional norms for newsface design. Compared with the much-used Excelsior, Swift has much more variation between thick and thin parts, and more sharpness and articulation, as in the tapering and angularly attached serifs. And Swift’s serifs are larger too – almost wings, in fact.
Swifts are extraordinary animals. More than any other bird species they are designed for flying, fast flying, often day and night. Their feet are good only for hanging on edged and walls, not for walking. They drink and bathe by skimming low across the surface of a body of water. They draw lines and exciting arcs through the air – a perfect model for the hand and pen of the designer.
   All the horizontal parts of Swift are just that: horizontal. Curves are drawn variously wide and sharp. Nor do the curves gradually turn into the stems, as in Excelsior: instead, they stand almost square on. As a result, Swift’s letters have large and strongly shaped counters. The shapes between the letters have been given just as much attention and have been treated virtually as autonomous shapes – as the links, in fact, between the letters. At the same time the horizontal emphasis and the generous serifs ensure good word and line formation. Consequently Swift can be narrowed electronically without undesirable distortion, so that the shape of the letters can be better adapted to a narrow column measure.
   The qualities that make Swift suitable for the heavy work in newspapers also come in handy for desktop publishing. Laser printers with low resolutions (300 dots per inch or 120 dots per centimetre) make things even more difficult for a typeface than a newspaper does. But even under these conditions Swift retains its character and legibility.
   Most newsfaces have large x-heights, making them appear large – sometimes even to extremes. This quality has been specially cultivated for newspapers so that smaller sizes can be used, thus saving space without sacrificing the appearance and legibility or large type. Bembo 10-point (with a small x-height) can be easily replaced with Excelsior 9-point. Using Excelsior it is possible to set large numbers of lines into a newspaper column. To cram even more text in, the letters are often condensed. This is a particularly widespread practice in the United States. Unfortunately, however, none of the classic typefaces was designed with condensed styles in mind and the effect is severely detrimental to their legibility.
   This fixation on large x-heights and economy of space has much in common with superstition, but economy is no longer the sole subject of attention in the choice of a newsface. Headlines and illustrations today receive more attention – and more space – than they used to. In many newspapers, articles are being written shorter and more compact and then set in larger sizes – 9, 9 ½ and sometimes even 10. But the front page of the average newspaper still carries at least 25-40% run-on text. The choice of the typeface used for this is what largely determines the atmosphere of the paper. And to set against the visual impact of large headlines, many and large illustrations, abundant use of colour and loads of advertisements, maintaining good legibility is easily as interesting as having large numbers of characters in a column.
   There is a limit to how far it is possible to go in blowing up x-height. We can live with the rudimentary ascenders and descenders that are the consequence, but there is simply too little space left between the lines. Readers are left gasping for air, and the only way to give it to them is to increase the leading. And that, of course, completely nullifies the benefits of the larger x-height, and the short ascenders and descenders lose their point. In Swift, the x-height has been kept comparatively small, and the ascenders and particularly the descenders benefit from this. The forms of words become more striking, and legibility is improved. And because of the spacious and unusual counters of its letters, in its smaller sizes Swift looks bigger than it actually is. In other words, Swift can be used in smaller sizes than conventional newsfaces.
   The tendency for newspapers to use ever-larger sizes with little or no leading is balanced to some extent by a trend in the opposite direction, towards smaller sizes with what for newspapers is an abnormally large amount of inter-line space. In the constant search for a way of setting themselves apart from other papers with different readerships, some designers are moving away from the usual crammed full appearance of the page and are looking for a more reserved, less ephemeral get-up, in which magazine- and book-like elements are creeping into newspapers.
   For setting run-on text Swift is available in two sorts: light and normal. There is no great difference in weight. Swift normal stands firmly on paper in small sizes like 8 ½ and 9-point for news items. In larger sizes like 10 and 11-point in texts like the editorial, the light version is sufficient. Or the normal version can be used for offset and the light for flexography. The medium is every bit as legible as the normal and the light, and is suitable for introductions, crossheads and longer texts requiring emphasis. The condensed bold was designed separately. Bold letters often lose in character compared with the normal versions. Although the serifs have been abbreviated to achieve compact setting, many of Swift’s features have been reinforced in the condensed bold version. The counters have been given even more attention. As a result the condensed bold not only gives good, pithy headlines, it also stays remarkably legible in the smaller sizes. A bold version is now in preparation; in weight it will be halfway between the medium and condensed bold. Small capitals and old style numerals will also be available before too long.
   A famous contemporary of Excelsior is Times New Roman, designed as a newsface in 1931. With its delicate shapes (sharp serifs and great contrast between thick and thin), Times found very little employment in newspapers outside the pages of The Times, but so much the more in every conceivable kind of other printing. Times is unquestionably the most often used typeface in the world. And indeed, after the coming of offset to newspapers it has also been used widely in papers other than the august journal for which it was originally conceived. What Swift and Times have in common is the positioning of the change from thick to thin. In both these faces the thickest parts of the curves are not in the middle but above and below it. (This is old face as opposed to Excelsior’s modern face.) Swift also has triangular serifs, as does Times. The old style stress of Times and Swift produces livelier and more pronounced word shapes than Excelsior’s vertical stress.
   The old style stress also makes for better proportioned lines. Vertical stress is also the reason why the thickest – vertical – parts of the letters receive so much emphasis that an impression of verticality is conveyed in columns which clashes with the horizontal shapes of the lines: which have enough trouble as it is, in narrow newspaper columns with their enormous spaces between the words. With electronic condensation of the letters this only gets worse.
   But there are also, of course, large differences between Times and Swift. The letters of Times are more closed-in in shape, and they stand alone more than Swift’s do. Time’s serifs are smaller. And they run out thinly, so that they are easily damaged. Time’s capitals are heavier than its other characters and to modern typographical tastes they are too wide and too large. These features combine to make Times an old-fashioned face, but it is now so firmly entrenched that it is bound to go on being the world’s most frequently used face for many a long year to come.
   Thanks to modern technology the concept of the newsface has now become blurred. Any typeface that can keep its legibility in newspapers printed under present conditions is fit to serve as a newsface. And conversely, a newsface that has been designed for improved circumstances can easily be used in other sorts of printing such as supplements, catalogues, tourist guides and paperbacks.
   For very many years, newsfaces could do little more than survive as best they could under the onslaught of technology. This prime requirement gave them all the same “generic look”, and indeed it was this that tended to make newspapers look newspaperish. In the more idiosyncratic and variegated styles that are becoming increasingly apparent in newspapers internationally, there is room for choosing more strongly flavoured text faces of greater sophistication and refinement. Personally I find clarity, liveliness and strength important qualities in typefaces for newspapers, whether for headlines or columns. Newsfaces should not be exaggeratedly or obscurely detailed, but nor should they be flaccid or static.
   We now have a reasonable variety of seriffed typefaces to choose from beyond the traditional bunch. When it comes to sans-serifs, however, there is practically nothing that will do for newspaper. Sans-serifs are still very little used for running text in newspapers, though they do enjoy a small following when it comes to headlines. However, interest in sans-serifs for both applications is growing. It should be possible to help satisfy that interest with more powerful, more highly spiced and more personal letter forms than the rather wishy-washy and self-satisfied sans-serifs that have dominated the scene, such as it was, for the past thirty years.
   Compared with types for other categories of printing, the design of newsfaces has always been more or less neglected. Despite the regular appearance of new newsfaces, the range available has remained limited and patchy. And none of them has been really what one could call new. Most of them are rehashes of the “Legibility Group”. Now that the design of newspapers is showing such vigorous signs of life again, it is high time some more innovatory typefaces were brought out and newsfaces as a group started giving newspaper designers the same kind of choice that the designers of other kinds of printed matter have had for years if not centuries.

Copyright © Gerard Unger, Summer 1988

1998-06-12