Typophile

Student Newspaper Redesign

ferry

Hi all,

We’re a daily university paper working on a redesign this summer and struggling with fonts. We have a history of neglecting and harassing our readers with shoddy fonts, so we’re looking for any help we can get. Everything is open for us —— body, headline, nameplate.

First, some specs:
We run five days a week and our audience is primarily 18-22 year old students. We take our news seriously, but we happily print columns about sex and drugs, and we run words like “****” in the opinion section.

We’re on a 11’x17’ tabloid (59p x 95) on newsprint and we’re irregularly in color (cnyk). We print 11,000 a day. We are six columns wide, and run with body font size @ 10.5. Headlines run at 42, 36 and 30. Subheads are at 18.

Finally, we’re low on money.

God knows why, but for the past few years we’ve been using Bodoni Book for body text. Right now, we’re looking at Trump Medieval.

For headlines, we’d like one serif and one sans serif. Right now we like Miller Headline, but we’re not made of money and any cheaper suggestions would be wonderful. (I believe Rotation is on the shortlist.) Sans serif is up in the air.

Our hunt for a perfect nameplate font is beginning to feel quixotic: we’d like to find one that is modern and forward thinking but vaguely elegant/classic —— all the while keeping in mind that we’re a bunch of idiot 22 year old students. (I suppose a nameplate is a very personal thing, but I just thought I’d ask.)

Sorry that ran so long, we really appreciate the help.

David & Sabrina

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John Nolan

Given the volume of work your doing, you should probably try not to think too much about price in your choice: fonts would be a fairly insignificant cost compared to all the printing costs!

There are, of course, lots of possibilities: the Miller family is tried and true for body and headlines. Font Bureau has a number of other fonts you should consider, and has lots of expertise. You should probably contact them.

Have a look Adobe’s Utopia, and, a more “outside” choice, Adobe’s Chaparral. If you own Adobe software, you may already have some of these. (Also, Adobe offers some of their fonts in special collections for education, see more info here.)

A very nice face you may not have consider is OurType’s Arnhem. Arnhem Fine is “modern and forward thinking but vaguely elegant/classic.” Go to http://www.ourtype.be/home.htm, wait for the Flash to load, and navigate from there.

Also look at Kris Sowersby’s Newzald at Village.

And Eudald News.

Finally, be sure to read the EULAs for any fonts you’re considering: many foundries allow 5 seats at one location as part of their standard license, for others it’s one. Some allow embedding in PDFs (which may or may not be important to you), others do not, or charge extra.

ferry

Hey thanks so much for the suggestions.

Arnhem is lovely looking and even, dare I say, cool. It seems worth the purchase.

Sorry to trouble you further, but do you have any suggestions for a sans seriff (for headlines)? We could settle on ITC Franklin Gothic, but it would be just that — settling. <

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