Welcome to National Newspaper Week.
The newspaper business has changed a lot since the peak of print, but if you look closely – sometimes really closely – you’ll find changes throughout the history of putting the day’s news on paper.
Like when the New York Times took a very small but important punctuation mark out of its logo.
The paper started as the New-York Daily Times in 1851; the founders, Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, wrote in the first edition, “we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come.”
The paper won acclaim and subscribers for its coverage of the Civil War, and for reporting on New York City political boss William Tweed.
Eventually it won award after award after award as well as the nickname the “paper of record,” as in, if it the Times covered something, then that something must have mattered.
The original logo put the paper’s name in ornate Gothic lettering, there was a relatively short-lived hyphen between “New” and “York,” and there was a period at the end.
I’m not a linguist, so I don’t know why you’d need a period at the end of what is not a sentence.
That said, the period was a subtle nod to the idea that here was a newspaper with authority.
And it was modeled after the look at the London Times, which also used the script lettering and a period at the end.
But in 1961, the New York Times decided to modernize its look a little bit.
Designer Edward Benguiat gave the script letters a more visually striking look.
And art director Lou Silverstein took out the period entirely.
The story goes that nobody at the paper complained about changes to the heading the paper had used for over a century, but taking out that period led to a lot of fuss.
As Silverstein wrote in a memoir, “Dropping the period caused much consternation and soul-searching at the Times, until finally the production manager came up with the calculation that eliminating the period would save some $600 a year in ink! That saved the day.”
Or, you could say, it put a period at the end of the debate.
Here’s a notable new branding exercise.
There’s a two-piece luggage set you can buy, a roller bag and a backpack, where both pieces of luggage are shaped like LEGO!
So if everyone got these would the baggage handlers be able to stack them together in the cargo hold?
The Daily Heller: The Designer Who Put a Full Stop to the Period! (Print Magazine)
LEGO Luggage (The Awesomer)
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Image via Wikicommons
