News design

News design is the process of arranging material on a newspaper page, according to editorial and graphical guidelines and goals. Main editorial goals include the ordering of news stories by order of importance, while graphical considerations include readability and balanced, unobtrusive incorporation of advertising.

News design incorporates principles of graphic design and is taught as part of journalism training in schools and colleges. Overlapping and related terms include layout, makeup (formerly paste up) and pagination.

The era of modern newspapers begins in the mid-nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, and increased capacities for printing and distribution. Over time, improvements in printing technology, graphical design, and editorial standards have led to changes and improvements in the look and readability of newspapers. Nineteenth-century newspapers were often densely packed with type, often arranged vertically, with multiple headlines for each article. A number of the same technological limitations persisted until the advent of digital typesetting and pagination in late 20th century.

Designers typically use desktop publishing software to arrange the elements on the pages directly. In the past, before digital pre-press pagination, designers used precise "lay out dummies" to direct the exact layout of elements for each page.

A complete layout dummy was required for designating proper column widths by which a typesetter would set type, and arrange columns of text. Layout also required the calculation of lengths of copy (text in "column inches"), for any chosen width.

Much of the variance and incoherence of early newspapers was because last minute corrections were exclusively handled by typesetters. With photographic printing process, typesetting gave way to paste-up, whereby columns of type were printed by machines (phototypesetters) on high-resolution film for paste-up on photographed final prints. These prints in turn were "shot to negative" with a large format production camera —directly to steel-emulsion photographic plates.

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