"With newspapers in the 1950s, when 90% of Americans subscribed, you didn't pay for a paper for its beauty," said Mario Garcia, a well-known consultant who recently redesigned the Wall Street Journal.

“At a time when no one really cared how newspapers looked, Ed Arnold told them to reorganize and reduce clutter," he added.

In the 1960s, Arnold implemented bigger types and wider, more readable columns, self-explanatory pictures and graphics as well as a layout where stories could be packaged in structured squares. These changes have become the standard today, and started shaping the way content was formulated, but only in order to emphasize it.

Nowadays, the focus on clear and graphic design can become excessive, and eclipse the content or the meaning of the design.

"The front-page images on our newspaper are becoming so big that they don't attract the reader, they attract the looker," Arnold told a Society for News Design publication in 2000. “

“We are over-designing, and we are over-coloring, so what the reader is confronted by is a three-ring circus. Who do I watch? The bareback riders, the weightlifter or the jugglers?"

This indeed seems to be the strategy progressively adopted by tabloids and more quality newspapers. If the trend continues, there will come a day when design truly becomes the content, and Arnold’s lessons will have only led to their own abuse.

Source: LA Times