Times as ransom note

Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index has become a go-to daily blog digest of editorial cartoons. Today, though, he commiserates about the incredible shrinking (except for the new Image section) Los Angeles Times — and critiques the design of the front page in graphic form. He counts 22 different type styles and says that's wayyyyy too many.

I've been watching my local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, as it slowly crashes and burns. The paper is bleeding subscribers as their circulation plummets, hastened by terrible editorial decisions like firing their Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, Michael Ramirez. Every part of the paper is degraded, week by week.

Not long ago, the Times went through a "re-design" that included their front page. I thought I would reproduce it here because so many graphic artists read our blog. Every first year design student knows that it is bad form to mix too many fonts. Beginners who get their hands on a computer for the first time are usually fascinated by fonts, and produce documents that look like ransom notes. If your church newsletter looks like a ransom note, you can be sure that it was designed by the pastor's sister -in-law on her new Macintosh. So it is with the Times' front page.

I grabbed the front page of yesterday's Times and counted the fonts - twenty two different fonts - just above the fold on the front page! (there are more different fonts below the fold, but I had to stop somewhere.) Check it out ...

Head on over to see his critique full-sized. No permalink that I could find.