Abstract
Do you remember when the “furniture” of a newspaper page was designed to help the reader? Each layout was the product of thought, craft and a knowing eye, taking readers by the hand and leading them round the page. Now we have picture captions such as this, in a recent spread in The Times about Vladimir Putin’s family: “Svetlana Krivonogikh’s daughter, Elizaveta, circled, bears a striking resemblance to Putin, who has two daughters, Maria and Katerina, left, with ex-wife Lyudmila, far left – Katerina, below, became a dancer. Bottom, Alina Kabaeva, the ‘secret first lady’.”
Are you with me so far? I hope not, because I am totally lost in a collage of images. Speaking as a general reader (that’s me, not pictured), I think that whoever designed the spread should be shot by the luckless sub-editor who was forced to write a long caption for a tiny space. The annoying example I cite is not unique. On some pages you feel you are joining a “spot the caption” competition because they are scattered about and nowhere near any picture. On other pages there is no caption at all – just a parenthetical mention in the text to a picture (left or right, above or below).
I can’t be the only reader who likes to know the identity of the headshot before turning to the text. Now I must read everything around the picture in the hope of enlightenment. In the olden days, last century, a caption usually appeared beneath the relevant picture. We don’t want to dwell in the past, but I can’t help thinking of my first and greatest editor Harold Evans and his 1970s series of books on the newspaper industry. Here was his preface to the last one: “This is the fifth and final title in my series on newspaper editing and design. It is concerned with the magical area of layout.”
What happened to the magic and who can I blame? It could be an unexpected side-effect of otherwise welcome advances in printing technology. Perhaps attention is going online and no one cares enough about the printed page. Or is making things easy for the reader now simply considered too pedestrian?
Footnotes
The writer held senior editorial posts on The Northern Echo, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Colleagues have always admired his eye for design.