What is Visual Literacy?// Newspapers

This time I am collecting newspapers and cutting them up, rearranging them and hopefully discovering something about type hierarchy here. Once again I hope that the newspapers I consider to be well designed contain a limited amount of fonts and colours while the papers I consider to be messy will have a more free-for-all approach to type.





GOOD

I would consider the FT to be a well designed newspaper. They follow a strict grid rule and try to keep the tones low key and easy to view. Despite these facts, the FT is a pretty daunting read, not because of content but because of the fairly confusing layout. Inside the paper there is so much non-stop text that it can become overpowering, this might just be my dyslexia talking, but I feel the paper needs more breaks, wider margins perhaps...

Suprisingly after cutting out all the fonts it is clear that there are way more that you would expect. I do suspect that the majority of these fonts come from the ads on the front page, but this still should be considered as part of the overall design so this is an unsuspected outcome. On another note there is an interesting type hierarchy here, the papers name and the main article titles are the largest point size, this is followed by the advert type. This must be because the heavy type really stands out against the tiny point size the FT opts for.

In my type hierarchy of importance I have only shifted the ads and the body copy around. I feel that the titles and article headers are all well represented by wither an increase in the weight of the text or its point size. 

AVERAGE

This is what I would consider to be an average paper. There is not too much interesting stuff going on here but the page layout follows a set grid which is stuck to im most places. The paper is a student housing newspaper so I suppose its a no-thrills sort of thing.

This is the type laid out in order of point size. It is clear that this layout designer felt that the more important the information the larger the text should be. There is so little variation in text in the page that there is very little to mess around with of comment on here.

I've only had to switch over the article for the writers names and page number to sort this by importance of information.

BAD

This is what I would consider to be a poorly designed newspaper. There is a lack of or disregard for a grid and colour, type and image all clash almost uncontrollably. For some reason text all sits in the bottom right and images fill the top left of the page, I wonder if this has something to do with the human eyes natural path across the page or if this is is just coincidence and the designers have simply not considered balancing any of the type or image evenly.

Again another surprise, this time there is much less variation in type, even compared to the FT. Although I will point out that in this newspaper they use many different typeface families rather than just variations of one like in most other papers. Having laid out the text in order of point size and weight it is clear that small commentary and remarks are more of a mainstay in this paper and it relies much less on the body copy to do all the talking.

After reorganising in terms of importance I have shifted all of the rubbish commentary to the bottom and decided that the main text would be more of a priority to me. Its is also interesting to point out that the papers name, one of the smallest pieces of text on the page is something I would find quite important to bring more attention too.