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“Incalculable Loss” front page of The New York Times for May 24th, 2020

The newspaper publishes its first purely typographic front page in modern times, acknowledging a grim milestone in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Contributed by Nick Sherman on May 25th, 2020. Artwork published in
May 2020
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1 Comment on ““Incalculable Loss” front page of The New York Times for May 24th, 2020”

  1. In an email conversation with Andrew Sondern, he explained the details of the typographic execution and the practical considerations involved:

    The typesetting is based almost entirely on [global] hyphenation and justification settings, with very modest [local] tracking tweaks here and there, and I did it in InDesign to get more control over those tolerances. The order was intentional and the piece was actively being edited until deadline, so I didn’t have a lot of control over the type and breaks. I also didn’t even typeset the page personally for the last two editions. Keep in mind, too, that this is a single text block of over 13,000 words with no paragraph breaks. Any minute change could alter every single line break, so the most important work was setting up a flexible scaffolding.

    At one point, I had the spaces around bullets as en spaces to control that distance and to avoid ending or beginning a line on a bullet. The text colored nicely in my type sample, but once I flowed real type in hours before deadline, the rivers became very difficult to manage and required frequent manual interventions. In the end, I went with a straightforward solution that looked good enough to avoid production difficulties; those gaps around the bullets are just two regular spaces, justified to fill.

    From there, we flowed a draft of the type in using old-fashioned InDesign tag text markup, and I made editorial and design tweaks directly in InDesign.

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