Somehow, it was as if I had been preparing a lifetime for the redesign of The Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal is recognized as the icon of what a newspaper should look like. This, of course, made the task all the more difficult. Such vintage films as “Some Like it Hot” and “La Dolce Vita” display The Wall Street Journal as it was in the 1950s, but it could have been the year 2000: the text-driven page, the vertical movement, the type-only visuals.
As a professor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I began each semester holding up a copy of The Wall Street Journal , then asking my eager students – all 110 of them – to draw up a sketch of how they would redesign it. It isn’t a surprise that the students tried to make The Wall Street Journal “modern” by immediately placing a photo on page one, or adding a color chart somewhere, with the most daring even designing a new color logo.
At the end of the semester, I would revisit the assignment: asking them to look at the newspaper again and to repeat the exercise. The results would tell me how much the students had learned about design, typography and most significantly, the importance of respecting what I call the culture as part of the design process.
The design of almost anything is based on intricate values that link it to a place, a moment in time, and the personalities behind it. Newspapers, specifically, are deeply rooted in their culture, not to mention those who create it. The Wall Street Journal, more than most, has a rich and distinct culture that gives it the luster of almost a visual institution.
The best students in my class, when revisiting the assignment at the end of the semester, would tread lightly, effecting subtle changes, using brushes, light colors, thin strokes, with the design playing in the choir while the texts and the content became the protagonists.
“Grandpa used to read it, dad reads it, and it is mighty fine as it is,” a student once told me. She had the courage to stand in front of the class with her project, one in which had barely changed anything. I wonder where she is today.
Little did I know as a young professor that one day in 2001, I would be faced with my own assignment to take a good look at The Wall Street Journal and offer my ideas for redesigning it.
The process actually began when I was invited, in 1999, to redesign the international editions of The Wall Street Journal in Europe and Asia. That work was completed successfully in 2000, when the newspaper introduced color and photography to those editions.
So now it was time to work with the “mothership” in New York. This was set to be a more challenging task, the main edition of The Wall Street Journal, with more pages, and perhaps more conservative readers.
From the beginning, this set out to be a collaborative effort between our team at Garcia, and The Wall Street Journal team, headed by Joanne Lipman, deputy managing editor, and Joe Dizney, art director.
It was then that, as if researching to prepare to write a novel or film script, I decided to involve myself and my designers in the sort of visual archaeology rarely associated with design.
For a new newspaper to develop, it had to honor its own rich past. We looked at volumes of The Wall Street Journal through the 1920s and all the way to the 1950s—the ones immortalized by Billy Wilder and Federico Fellini, when the newspaper became the icon it is today.
That digging turned up wonderful visual motifs, along with many elements of story structure and storytelling that we preserved.
We started developing story structures to facilitate hierarchy through the pages: each story was composed of specific elements, depending on placement and importance. This helps to move the reader from story to story, and page to page.
Once we had established that, it was time to concentrate on page architecture, trying to get away from a fixed six column format, and alternating with five column formats for section fronts.
Most importantly, as a basic foundation of this design, was the creation of a color palette, to make sure that when color appeared on page one, for example, it would be designed in an elegant manner. We ended up with very few colors, that would be used consistently and repeatedly, with mint green, sky blue and soft champagne as some of the most prominent.
All of that, accompanied by the refined and redrawn Scotch Roman typeface, helped us give the new Wall Street Journal a look that, although new and modern, did not take away from the look and feel of the traditional newspaper. An avid reader would still recognize his newspaper in the newly redesigned Wall Street Journal. That was our main goal, and it was achieved.
Our concern was to make sure that the past was securely preserved, and then we could bring in elements of the future. Along the way came better navigation, including a new panel to promote inside stories, on page one.
The new newspaper was here, a marriage of the decades, the preservation of that which is genuinely and uniquely Wall Street Journal, with new elements that no doubt will become part of it’s identity for future readers.
This design was an intellectual exercise, involving the discipline and discoveries of research, the analysis of hundreds of journalistic and storytelling elements, past and present, plus the input of many editors at various levels with whom we worked for 21 months.
Working with our creative director, Ron Reason, and designer Ed Hashey, the staff of the WSJ was able to produce a stylebook, titled FORMAT, in which we incorporated all the changes, leaving them easily explained for editors and designers to refer to during daily production of the newspaper.
Of course, habitual readers will be a little surprised when they first see the new newspaper, but once they take the time to go through it over a few days; they will realize that the expansion had the readers interest at heart.
Perhaps now my former Syracuse University students—many of whom are art directors and journalists around the globe—can evaluate their professor on the ultimate assignment.