By comparison, last year’s design changes at the Wall Street Journal, the only paper in the country that had matched the Times in combination of large circulation, reputation, and aesthetic conservatism, look almost radical (and remarkably successful: They’ve made the Journal’s fusty front page look accessible and contemporary). It doesn’t come close to altering the fundamental character of the paper or even the experience of flipping through it. It also comes with a huge character set that covers not only Western. SoftMaker’s Cheltenham Pro typeface family contains OpenType layout tables for sophisticated typography. The result is Cheltenham Pro, a typeface that is exceptionally readable and holds up even in adverse printing conditions. In the larger scheme of things, of course, the Times’ redesign is minimal. SoftMaker updated the design yet again in 2012. (Those changes were so subtle as to be essentially unrecognizable and became the subject of some restrained chiding from the Times itself, in a recent Sunday “Arts & Leisure” piece.) And the work Carter has done for the Times is certainly more substantial than the logo redesign he just finished for another New York institution, the Museum of Modern Art. People develop strong relationships with the design of objects they see or use every day, and changes-even minor ones-can be jolting. “I think the old Bookman/Century/Cheltenham/News Gothic/Latin Extra Condensed combination had more character and felt both more ‘newsy’ and more ‘New York,’ ” one designer wrote in a post to a typography Web site, adding that the Cheltenham headlines struck him, as they had me, as “a little too pretty and too harmless.” * A letter to the editor that appeared in the Times two days after the switch was harsher, calling the new Cheltenham regime “the typeface equivalent of New Coke.” This might seem like an overestimation of the symbolic weight that typefaces should have to carry, but I certainly wasn’t alone in having it. Especially when standing alone and used in italics- And the New York Times Loves To Put Headlines in Italics-its replacement, Cheltenham, seems too carefree and lightweight to introduce a story about sniper victims or dead American soldiers. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION Letterpress Cheltenham Bold Extended Uppercase typeface wood type printing blocks, reconstructed and redesigned as wood. Much more noticeable, and tougher to get accustomed to, is the Times’ decision to do away with Bookman, a serif typeface that it had used for many of its single-deck headlines stretching above stories three and four columns wide. This switch was easy to forget about in a couple of days.
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