Historic moments call for his­toric front pages and his­toric head­lines. Yet not all of them are as suc­cess­ful as they would like to be. Both the News­de­signer and The Guardian web­sites have com­piled gal­leries fea­tur­ing the front pages of yesterday’s major news­pa­pers. News​de​signer.com has over fifty Amer­i­can front pages, while the 21 on Guardian.​co.uk include for­eign ones as well. And if you’re feel­ing par­tic­u­larly unpro­duc­tive today or tomor­row you can always trawl through over 700 front pages from 66 coun­tries on New​seum.org. But don’t tell your boss/partner/spouse that you got that link from me. ;)

While some limit their cre­ativ­ity to coming up with a strik­ing head­line, other news­pa­pers did a com­plete over­haul of their front page for this his­toric occa­sion. Of spe­cial inter­est is how the recently redesigned Chicago Tri­bune, The Okla­homan and Hart­ford Courant han­dled the story in their new formats.

The Okla­homan chose a rather con­ven­tional option. A page-​wide land­scape pic­ture takes up about a quar­ter of the page height, and the head­line in Tobias Frere-​Jones’ Retina – together with Chron­i­cle the new typo­graphic style of the news­pa­per – spells it out in bold let­ters. The Chicago Tri­bune favours a bolder approach with an almost full page pho­to­graph that extends behind the name­plate, and the Mer­cury Dis­play head­line reversed in white at the bottom. The front page is pow­er­ful, with an inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion – note how Obama’s out­stretched hand seems to rest on the head­line, and the upwards vector from hand to face makes it a dynamic but still dig­ni­fied image. And the Hart­ford Courant takes it one step fur­ther by tilt­ing their front page side­ways to accom­mo­date a land­scape photo of the President-​elect and his family. Yet by doing so – and in the absence of any type except some small Rock­well at the bottom – this exe­cu­tion almost lit­er­ally falls flat.

The Chicago Sun-​Times dis­plays the impres­sive power of sub­dued typog­ra­phy. The small “Mr. Pres­i­dent” in Utopia (thanks, Kent) at the bottom of the full page image proves to have tons more impact than the biggest, bold­est headline.

Quod erat demon­stran­dum. Not only does the head­line on the Boston Herald verge on being con­de­scend­ing, but Hel­vetica Com­pressed looks unwieldy at such giganomous sizes. They’d better have stuck with Bureau Grot Light which is used in the sec­ondary head­line. The whole piece is a mess anyway, with the dis­parate ele­ments posi­tioned in a seem­ingly random way.

As far as bold type and big images go the front page for Rocky Moun­tain News fares far better, but you’d expect no less from a pub­li­ca­tion that was designed by Danilo Black (see also Roger Black’s excel­lent The Last Blog) with the custom head­line face Rocky by Matthew Carter. And Benton Sans has that je-ne-sais-quoi that makes it sit on the page so pleasantly.

The New York Times stick to their reg­u­lar format and this poses a slight com­po­si­tion prob­lem. The “Obama” above the head­line – set in Matthew Carter’s beau­ti­ful custom designed Chel­tenham – accen­tu­ates the cen­tred set­ting. Because the photo right under­neath it is posi­tioned accord­ing to the column grid it is off centre and makes the whole thing look a tad mis­aligned. Classy and conventional.

Although it fol­lows the same modus operandi as The New York Times the front page of The Wall Street Jour­nal looks more bal­anced. The head­line type is the custom WSJ Scotch by The Font Bureau, Inc.; the great look­ing num­bers on the right side belong to the afore­men­tioned Retina. The WSJ Scotch family is now com­mer­cially avail­able as Escrow (thanks, Kent). This is a nice con­ven­tional one as well.

The Star Tri­bune front page teaches us that it so helps to have a strik­ing head­line face. The page-​wide pho­to­graph per­fectly com­ple­ments the head­line set in Chris­t­ian Schwartz’s Stag. The type­face was orig­i­nally com­mis­sioned by David Cur­cu­rito and Darhil Crooks for Esquire. It is rem­i­nis­cent of clas­sic slab serif faces like Beton, Peignot’s Egyp­ti­enne Noir, Georg Trump’s Schadow, and Scarab but more com­pact and con­tem­po­rary, with the black­est weights coming dan­ger­ously close to Aachen. Pop­u­lar, with the sub­head in Whit­man Dis­play (thanks, Kent).

Another news­pa­per which has been in the news a while ago is The Bal­ti­more Sun which was redesigned in 2005. It uses Mencken, a family of custom faces in Text and Head ver­sion by Jean-François Porchez. The type itself is quite beau­ti­ful, but is poorly inte­grated in the photo. It pre­vents the image from “breath­ing”, making it feel a bit claus­tro­pho­bic. And why on earth is that hor­ren­dous Euros­tile allowed to reside on the front page?

The San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle com­bines a strik­ing image with equally strong typog­ra­phy on its front page. The full page pho­to­graph is lit­er­ally under­lined by the head­line. Revers­ing out the first line at the bottom edge of the pho­to­graph and stick­ing the top of the second line to its base­line makes for a dra­matic and sur­pris­ing com­po­si­tion. It’s a shame the ban­ners just below the name­plate look so corny.

One of the most beau­ti­ful front pages I dis­cov­ered in the New­seum gallery up till now, and up to par with the Chicago Tri­bune and San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle ones, is the styl­ish front page for The Patriot News. The sepia tones of the pho­to­graph, Obama’s head that slightly covers the bottom of the Poyn­ter Old Style Dis­play head­line (thanks, Jan), the com­po­si­tion with the two quotes – one by Martin Luther King and one by Barack Obama – reversed in the pho­to­graph, … It all comes together per­fectly in an ele­gant and dig­ni­fied front page.

And to close off this arbi­trary selec­tion of front pages I present you “my” news­pa­per De Morgen, two times winner of the Euro­pean News­pa­per Award, which came up with a novel solu­tion. As the out­come of the elec­tion wasn’t yet known due to the time dif­fer­ence they simply went for a reversible front page. Ele­men­tary, my dear Watson. Yet the loca­tion of the bar code and colour strip betrays the editor already had a hunch who was going to win …

If any­thing, this col­lec­tion is tes­ti­mony to the endurance of news­pa­pers and the printed media. Print is not dead, as this entry on Khoi Vinh’s Sub­trac­tion blog attests. This is con­firmed by the reprints of the front pages that are offered on many a news­pa­per web­site. So I’ll just leave it up to you to dis­cover those numer­ous front pages in the var­i­ous gal­leries. Of course you’re always wel­come to com­ment below. The floor is yours.

Tags: American Elections, front pages, headlines, newspapers, Obama 08