If you’ve been feeling off-kilter, like nothing’s been right all month, you can blame the New York Times.
Eminent typeface consultant Matthew Carter has gone to work on the paper’s style, and established a new font regime to replace the customarily slapdash effort. On the Media interviewed Carter about the change. Bear witness to Bob Garfield cracking himself up. Slate has a good amount of hand-wringing on the subject, as well as this succinct summary of the change:
“The lead story is usually topped by a triple-deck, single-column headline, which in the old setup employed two typefaces: Latin Extra Condensed at the top and then two decks of the sans-serif News Gothic below. In the new design, all three decks are in Cheltenham, in its Bold Extra Condensed, Bold Condensed, and Medium varieties.”
For some truly inside-baseball discussion, head over to Typographica, where you can eavesdrop on conversations like this:
It’s interesting how the smaller x-height of Cheltenham highlights the headline style of The NY Times: ‘Initial Word, and All Important Words Capitalised’. Curiously, this effect is not as strongly pronounced in the headlines set in Italic. Also, in the captions the figures are pretty big, and stick out a lot. I wonder if these side-effects of the typographic make-over have been considered by Tom Bodkin.
a technology job is no excuse 