Typophile

Type for newspaper

kattttor

Hello,

I’m in the process of designing a student newspaper (Studentbladet www.stbl.fi). It’s about 20 pages in size. Size of the paper is A3 roughly.

Now I’m looking for header and body text fonts. I’m thinking about useing four diffrent fonts, two sans-serif for header and body text, two sans for smaller column headers and text.

You can find last years editions in PDF files here http://www.stbl.fi/tidning/. I’m going to redo pretty much everything since I and the rest of the new staff don’t agree with the current layout.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated since I’m new to designing a newspaper. Specially type, suggestions on good readable sans and sans-serifs for print.

peter

‹ plus Tarzana Wide Bold Italic alternatives ›
Don McCahill

I think if your paper is North American, you really should look at a serif face for the text. Very few newspapers here use sans for text. I would also be very careful about mixing different text faces. You are better to keep to one family for the text weights. It would be acceptable to find a pair of complementary sans families for heading applications.

jupiterboy

Might look at Greta.

kattttor

It’s not North American and it shouldn’t matter.

After looking around some more I think I’ll go with one serif for main articles headlines and body text and a sans for smaller columns headlines and body text. I’m also considering a third font for vignettes to certain articles that always occur in the paper with some added graphic elements.

Right now I’m leaning towards Caslon or maybe Jenson.

jupiterboy

Trim size, number of columns, and measure (as I’m sure you know) can demand a face that will set conservatively. Low x-height will also be tough to handle well in smaller point sizes. I would like to see a sample design if you have time to post.

You might slug in some Lido for reference if the Caslon and Jenson are not working like you would want.

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