Is the new De Standaard the new standard? 
De Standaard 23|04|2007 | front page of the first edition in the new graphic style
I recently bought a copy of De Standaard, the main competitor of the newspaper I usually read, De Morgen. Our company Magelaan was nominated for De Standaard Solidariteitsprijs with an awareness campaign for Wel Jong Niet Hetero focusing on young lesbian girls, and I wanted a copy of our ad in print. Having the newspaper in my hands suddenly reminded me that I had planned to evaluate the new graphic style and typography which was unveiled some three months ago. As I like to keep good on my promises, here's my long overdue review.
De Standaard 23|04|2007 | pages 2 & 3
The redesign is a collaboration between De Standaard’s own Johan Dockx and Rita Verhaege and Gert Dooreman, one of Belgium’s foremost graphic designers and typographers. It is an airy newspaper, which thanks to the brand spanking new presses now has colour throughout the whole paper. That colour comes mainly from the pictures, as the majority of the graphic elements are in warm greys, and subdued browns and blues. Hairline rules are used to divide columns, separate blocks and punctuate pull quotes. The overall style is restrained, classy and slightly highbrow.
De Standaard 23|04|2007 | financial supplement
The type choices reflect the general atmosphere of the design; all of them are The Font Bureau, Inc. fonts. Matthew Carter’s vibrant Miller Daily – a version specific for newspapers of his Scotch Roman revival – is the main text typeface. The Condensed version of Cyrus Highsmith’s Escrow – a Scotch series originally commissioned for The Wall Street Journal – is used for headlines, and additional weights for some further bits’n’bobs. Cyrus’ collaboration with Tobias Frere-Jones Benton Sans rounds out the typographic palette. This sans family is in fact the reworking of the popular American sans News Gothic into a far reaching new series, with matched weights and widths.
De Standaard 23|04|2007 | sports section
Although generally speaking and at first sight the redesign is quite successful, upon closer inspection some problems become evident. To fully understand what goes wrong, I have made a series of comparative photos of the previous design and the restyled one.
De Standaard | previous design (left) and restyle (right)
The front page has not really improved. As the nameplate moved down and became smaller, and the headlines are now set in mixed case (capitals and small letters), the distinction between the several elements on the front page has grown less pronounced. As a result it lacks strength, focus and structure. (Please look closely at the word ‘Wapenwet’, I will get back to that later on.)
De Standaard | previous design (left) and restyle (right)
De Standaard | previous design (left) and restyle (right)
De Standaard | previous design (left) and restyle (right)
Not only the front page lacks structure, the whole newspaper suffers from that. In the previous design big slab-serif Serifa initials signposted the different sections and facilitated navigation through the newspaper. In the new design sections transition almost seamlessly into the next. Restraint is not necessarily a good thing in newspaper design.
However I quite like the new classy front pages for the financial and cultural supplements. The nameplates set in Escrow with the swooping ampersand work really well in combination with the colour bars and the hairline rules. The one thing that bothers me about those rules throughout the whole newspaper is the fact that they are so sloppily positioned. Almost all of them either don’t connect or slightly overlap instead of neatly touching the perpendicular rule.
But that’s peanuts compared to how poorly the type is set. Initially though I was pleasantly surprised by the type choices, because I didn’t like the previous incarnation. Minion was too precious and plain to properly work as a newspaper text face, the headlines in Cheltenham Condensed felt like they were trying too hard to be The New York Times, and Frutiger Condensed has never been a favourite of mine. The typographic palette even before that (up to 2005) had a lot more personality: some deliciously chunky ITC Charter for body copy, News Gothic, Birch for section headings and a sparkling Joanna for lead-ins and headlines made me gloss over the pull quotes in (urgh…) Helvetica Condensed.
De Standaard | headline on front page
It’s of little use to select nice typefaces if you’re going to ruin them with poor setting. I was dismayed by some awkward spacing and glaring lack of proper kerning in the headlines. I’m not sure what happened, but the people at De Standaard must have tampered with the otherwise flawless spacing and kerning we’re accustomed to from Font Bureau fonts. They did the typefaces a serious disservice. Look for example at the enlargement of the front page headline I mentioned previously – there’s a large gap between the W and the a, and the p and e are too close to each other. This is not an exception but a rule for all headlines.
De Standaard 23|04|2007 | headline on page 2
But it’s not only the kerning tables of the headlines that are shot to hell. Also the letter- and word spacing have been modified for the worse. The spacing of individual characters goes beyond tight-but-not-touching – notice how the numerals in 115 are slammed into each other –, while word spaces are so big one could drive a truck through them. This makes for uneasy staccato reading.
And there’s also something amiss with the spacing of shorter text blocks – increased letterspacing in combination with tiny word spaces turns those blocksoftextintoimpenetrableablemuddyletterstreams.
So to conclude, it’s a pity that a couple things didn’t turn out too well with the new design of De Standaard. It makes me wonder how far the involvement is of a reputed typographer like Gert Dooreman, as the typography at some points truly is below par. Either his participation was a cursory one, or newspaper design is not his forte. Is the new De Standaard the new standard in newspaper design in Flanders? I fear not…
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This just in from Gert Dooreman: he communicated my complaints to the related parties, but he says there is little hope. They heard his own reservations months ago and still haven't acted upon them.
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In my experience a lot of designers are extremely sloppy in regard to microtypography. They ?discover? a nice typeface and continue with the broad picture, before evaluating the strenghts and weaknesses of the type. And don?t forget that the software is to be blamed too: most of it is of US-origin and therefore subject to the awfull typesetting practices over there (auto letterspacing, enormous wordspaces).
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lol, even The Telegraaf (NL) looks better then this, and that newspaper is ugly. ;)
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It almost hurts to see how these nice typefaces have been mistreated. No respect for the nice designs.
I really like the typefaces that have been chosen.
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Excellent post Yves. Very thorough and interesting. More of this, please.
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Looks like the designers at the paper are wrestling with the pagination system.
If the pagination system sets the value of the wordspace for the page as a whole (ignoring the space character value), then a comfortably wide space in the text may be too big in headlines.
Again, there may be restrictions on the number of kern pairs accessible, caused by the pagination system, which means that some will go missing.
Don't apply standards that work for a small studio running InDesign on a single platform, to a large newspaper with a totally different setup. The same fonts may perform quite differently.
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One thing that struck me is for what sake do they insist so terribly much on the separate parts being separable/to be taken out/"uitneembaar"? I think the prominent placing of this word in huge letters in the right upper corner is nothing more than an unthoughtful waste of space. Although I like this word's shape (and it somehow mirrors "de standaard"s "aa" to the right)?
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I think the rationale behind the large "Uitneembaar" on the front pages of the supplements is that they are inserted in the middle of the paper. This effectively disrupts the page numbering, which resumes past the supplements and is restored once those supplements have indeed been taken out. De Morgen has its supplements added at the back of the paper, so this poses no problem whatsoever for the page numbering.
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To be honest, in the past couple of restyles (ever since it changed from newspaper format to tabloid format), the design of the newspaper has only gone from excellent, to good, to bad, to simply atrocious. One might argue that "change is always perceived by two kinds of people: those in favour, and those against". But comparing this design with previous designs really shows a downward spiral in design precision.
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