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  • The Washington Post Is Dead

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    Posted on November 6, 2009 at 4:11 pm



    It always amazes me that clients hire bad designers. Most often one hears, “We just couldn’t afford them” as the disheartened synopsis. At the same time, that comment makes me want to ask “Who can afford to hire a bad designer?” Their work just goes unnoticed, fails to communicate, fails to engage, fails to sell. Whatever money has been spent is wasted. But I understand that many left brain decision-makers don’t understand the difference between average and good design, much less the difference between good and great. So why lose sleep over those who recognize quality in their own sphere but completely fail to get it in the visual domain?

    But one company who can afford to pay for great design has hired and set loose a truly bad designer. It’s hard to know where to begin attacking the new redesign of The Washington Post. There are so many terrible things to say about it.

    The use of Bodoni and Bodoni Bold is as good a place as any to start. Bodoni is a wonderfully elegant face designed for short bursts, but the same features that make it distinctive (the exaggerated difference between the thick and thin strokes, the ruled serifs) make it difficult to read. The liberal use of Bodoni Bold in headlines is inefficient and downright ugly. Yes, people react negatively to change as a rule. However, this is just bad typographical design.

    But the sins don’t end here. Borrowing The Wall Street Journal’s pointillist rendering style for columnists is not just theft, it’s bad branding! The Journal “owns” that style and is recognized for it in an instant. So what is the Post now: a second-hand Journal? Wrong. Wrong.

    I could go on to the page layouts for the magazine sections, but it would be too cruel. What’s sad about the redesign of the Post is that only 10 years ago it was redesigned by the uber-genius designers Walter Bernhard and Milton Glaser. It was a welcome, smart and elegant redesign of an old and frumpy paper.

    If this is the Post’s answer to the challenge of the Internet, then it is just whistling past the graveyard of other papers it will join soon enough.

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    Comments

    Comment from Rich Reilly November 19, 2009 at 11:23 am

    Within the overall context of “print — particularly newsprint — is dead”, the whole discussion is likely moot. The Post’s “makeover” I think, in general, seems pleasing enough…except for the hideous “WP” type treatment on the Sunday magazine. That look was DOA.

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Burkey Belser

 Burkey Belser

Burkey Belser, president and creative director, pioneered legal services marketing. He has been quoted on brand design topics by dozens of industry publications and is highly rated as a speaker on topics from branding to information design.

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