thesis-low-res.pdf

The Guardian of the Spectacle

An ideological analysis of newspaper design and proposals for détournement

Krister Bladh

Field of study: Graphic Design

Tutor: Anders Ljungmark

Spring 2010

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study is an undergraduate thesis for a Bachelor of Design at Malmö University, School

of Arts and Communication. An important part of the study is the series of screenprints that

were made but which can unfortunately only be reproduced here. Visit my website for more

and better photographs. I would like to thank my tutor Anders Ljungmark, Matilda Plöjel for

her invaluable input, and Bengt Andersson and everyone at (3)Screen in Malmö.

www.kristerbladh.co.uk

Published in Sweden by Malmö University, School of Arts and Communication,

through MUEP (Malmö University Electronic Publishing). http://dspace.mah.se

Published internationally by Lulu.com, printed on demand.

http://stores.lulu.com/detournement

ISBN: 978-0-557-47522-3

Typography: Miller, Helvetica Neue.

Abstract

Contents

How can the graphic design of a popular, con-

temporary newspaper be détourned to reveal

its ideological functioning? With inspiration

from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spec-

tacle , I analyse one issue of British daily The

Guardian and arrive at a model suggesting

that the more constant and implicit elements

show greater potential for being exaggerated

or manipulated.

An adapted form of détournement – a

method developed by the Situationists of

mid-20th century Paris – is applied to these

elements, resulting in redesigns of five front

pages of The Guardian. The printing tech-

nique best suited for the redesigns is found

to be screenprinting (in accordance with the

target audience of the project), and each front

page is printed in an edition of 50. Copies are

sent to the paper’s creative directors and edi-

tor as a reversed subscription, in addition to

being exhibited in Malmö in May-June 2010.

Together with this thesis, the prints aim to

inform users and producers of the newspaper

of the ideological consequences of design. The

project aims to inspire further research by de-

sign scholars and to show designers how to

work practically towards a more democratic

and transparent news media climate where

communication is mutual instead of one-way.

Keywords

Guy Debord

situationist

design studies

détournement

The Guardian

ideological

newspaper

newspaper design

screenprinting

Introduction

Aims and objectives

Scope

Background

State of the ield

Theory

Methodology

Deinitions

Structure

Design as ideology

Meanings of a newspaper

Using détournement

The Guardian analysed

Method

Photography

Layout (and grid)

Typography

Graphics

Advertisements

Format

Materiality

Conclusions

The Guardian redesigned

Process

Speciications

Introduction

Aims and objectives

Presentation

This is a study of the consequences the design

of popular newspapers have on contemporary

society and its dissemination of information.

It takes an ideological angle on the subject

with inspiration from Guy Debord’s still in-

fluential The Society of the Spectacle from

1967, asking: How can the graphic design of

a popular, contemporary newspaper be dé-

tourned (cf. Method ) to reveal its ideological

functioning? The objective of the project is

to carry out an in-depth analysis of a single

newspaper as well as the redesign of its front

page, as one step towards implementing the

results of the analysis. The primary aim is to

work towards a more democratic news media

environment, by informing the newspaper

and its readership of this issue. The secondary

aim is to identify avenues for further research

and recommended action for designers.

requirements of the target audience.

The target audience of the redesign should

be familiar with the paper chosen, and is thus

narrowed down to the paper’s staff and read-

ership. That they will be able to partake of the

results cannot be guaranteed, but an effort to

reach them is made. The nature of this and

any other presentations of the redesign and

indeed of this thesis are congruent with the

theoretical and methodological framework

used and motivated by it. An evaluation of

the success of the redesign itself will not be

included due to practical and time restraints.

Conclusions and summary

Implications of research

Evaluations

Recommendations for further research

List of igures

References

Appendix

Background

1 Scans of analysed issue

The newspaper that has been singled out for

study is the British daily The Guardian . Orig-

inally named The Manchester Guardian , it

has traditionally been known as a left-of-cen-

tre liberal publication. It has a strong cultural

section and an obvious interest in culture

(e.g. publishing their own books via Guard-

ian Books) and design (maintaining a bold

and distinctive look). David Hillman created

the previous design of the newspaper, which

it kept for 17 years. The old nameplate com-

bined an italic Garamond ‘The’ with a bold

Helvetica ‘Guardian’ and, notably for its time,

bold sans serif type was used for headlines

throughout, symbolising their political edge.

With the redesign in 2005 the paper also

changed format, from the traditional broad-

sheet to the smaller Berliner format (a slightly

taller tabloid) popular on the continent. New

typefaces were commissioned exclusively for

the newspaper and the Guardian Collection

with its core typeface Guardian Egyptian

was designed by Paul Barnes and Christian

Schwartz. The collection is now available for

licensing from Commercial Type for 1,200

USD. 1

The Guardian also exists as an online ver-

sion at www.guardian.co.uk, and through that

web site one can access digital versions of the

today’s and older issues in PDF format, for a

subscription fee. The tag line saying that you

2 Sources of distant elements

3 Original iles

Scope

4 Presentation material

The study is limited to the analysis of the

main section of one issue of one newspaper.

To make the study easier to understand glob-

ally, the object of study should be in the Eng-

lish language because although the content

of the news is not analysed, the reader is re-

quired to understand it, as formal properties

often derive from or are inseparable from the

content. The analysis will locate the produc-

tion of ideological meanings in the newspa-

per’s form, both material and aesthetic. How

ideology is defined in the study is explained

under Deinitions below.

The analysis leads to an outline of five

imperative strategies for redesign, which are

applied to five different front pages respec-

tively. The five strategies are by necessity

concerned with design aspects that are real-

istically open to considerable variation. This

excludes factors like printing technique or

print runs, since these provide both me and

the paper itself with restricted options. But

since both printing technique and print run

will differ from the original newspaper, these

choices are instead based on research and the

5 Guardian Collection brochure

6 Sizes and rates for ads

7 Sydsvenskan - så funkar det

1 cf. http://commercialtype.com/typefaces/guardian for samples and individual pricing. By coincidence the sample

text used if you choose English language is lifted from The Society of the Spectacle .

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INTRODUCTION

Why The Guardian?

• A wide readership and international repute (see below for circulation numbers).

• In the English language.

• Redesigned in 2005, which means that its look has not yet been outmoded. 2

• Its current design was created in-house and is here assumed to be in line with their

preferences and stance in all aspects. 3

• Its design can be considered successful due to the awards it has received. (There

would be no point in altering an unsuccessful design, as it would need to be changed

anyway.) They were awarded Best Designed Paper in the European Newspaper

Awards in 2005-2006 and DA&D Design’s Yellow Pencil Awards in 2006. The inter-

nationally influential Society For News Design (founded in 1979) elected them the

World’s Best Designed newspaper in 2006 and 2008.

• A professed interest in and openness to design, visible through its experiments with

type and grid. 4

• A relative susceptibility to the political aims of this project, thus offering a larger

probability of success.

made font from the radical redesign in 2004,

when the paper also switched to tabloid for-

mat. 9

sulting book Eyes On the News has carried an

authority at least in the newspaper industry. 11

This rather positivist approach aimed merely

to improve newspaper design and thus boost

sales, but it was the first major endeavour to

give design practice grounding in reliable re-

search. Previous studies, like those of Sandra

Utt and Steve Pasternak in 1985, The Poynter

Institute in the same year, and Ron F. Smith

in 1988 had shown conflicting results regard-

ing the use of colour in newspapers and were

based on unreliable research, which could not

prevent elements of the papers’ contents to

influence the outcome. 12

In 1994 designer and graphic arts profes-

sor Kevin G. Barnhurst published Seeing the

Newspaper , a ground-breaking introduction

to the history and meanings of the visual ele-

ments of a newspaper. 13 It is not an academic

study but rather an anecdotal and personal

account that relies to some degree on profes-

sional experience. It contains several interest-

ing “exercises” that provide natural paths for

research. The final exercise entitled simply

“Seeing the Newspaper” is more or less what

I have done in my analysis with the exception

that Barnhurst calls for a “universal” analysis

that is seemingly context-free. It is also thor-

oughly steeped in the American history and

practice of printing and news-reporting, and

furthermore uses its visuals for illustration

rather than concrete examples.

Robert Craig approached the field from

the opposite direction, as Professor of Com-

munication at Colorado University and editor

of the Communication Theory journal, when

he argued “towards a semiotics of graphic de-

sign” in a 1990 article for Design Issues , called

“Ideological Aspects of Publication Design”. 14

Craig does not delve deeply but his call for a

new awareness of the consequences of design

was answered by Gunther Kress and Theo van

State of the ield

There has been considerable research con-

ducted in visual culture studies and media

studies about news media and their contents.

While discourse analyses of, and semiotic ap-

proaches to text and image and their combi-

nations abound – especially concerning the

new media (e.g. television and the internet)

– the visual form these texts and images are

contained in is often overlooked. The tradi-

tional, printed newspaper tends to be seen

as obsolete, perhaps even doomed. On other

hand there is a generous amount of books on

practical newspaper design, ranging back to

the 1960’s when newspapers started to incor-

porate design knowledge into the production.

As technology has progressed new books and

new editions have appeared, but since the

1990’s publications have diminished as news-

papers get increasingly concerned with mak-

ing the leap into the digital news market and

finding ways of compensating for diminishing

sales. Those books are often not critical but

based on professional knowledge and they

usually take the form of the handbook or the

case studies book. They address the function-

al and structural aspects of design. Attempts

to combine this knowledge with analysis and

media discourse research have been made,

but only in cursory terms. 10

One important study was carried out at

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies by

Mario R. Garcia and Pegie Stark in 1990-91.

Using Eye-Trac technology (monitoring of

eye pupil movement) developed by Gallup

Applied Science they analysed mainly the

impact of colour in newspapers, and the re-

can view them “just as they are printed in the

UK” is not completely true as the PDFs only

have normal screen resolution and would not

look as crisp as the real paper, if printed at

full size. It is a useful feature for non-UK resi-

dents however, since the “international edi-

tion” that is published around the world lacks

all supplements except for a thinned-down

version of g2, the daily second section of the

paper. Furthermore, it is completely printed

in black and white except for the front and

back pages of the main section, and does not

sport the same printing quality due to being

printed in local presses streamlined for other

papers.

The Guardian is printed in full colour

and had a circulation of 313,026 copies daily

in 2009. The readership was estimated to

1,420,000 by the National Readership Study

in the same year. 6 It is published Monday to

Saturday and replaced by its sister paper The

Observer on Sundays. A digest of both papers

is published as The Guardian Weekly (also

including material from The Washington Post

and Le Monde ). They are part of the Guard-

ian Media Group which is owned by the Scott

Trust. For this study, only the main section of

the regular UK edition is considered.

For comparative purposes regarding de-

sign aspects not covered in previous studies,

local right-of-centre, liberal daily Sydsven-

skan will be used for reference. It is one of

the most read newspapers in Sweden with

an estimate of 311,000 readers daily (by Or-

vesto Konsument, 2008). 7 It was redesigned

in March 2009, with all typefaces replaced by

Miller, Moderno and interestingly Guardian

Sans and the newly available Guardian Com-

pact. 8 The only retained typographic element

is Peter Bruhn’s nameplate using a custom

2 James de Vries uses it as an example of current example of good newspaper design in his article “Newspaper

Design as Cultural Change” in Visual Communication , January 2008, Vol. 7, No. 5, p. 6.

3 For an exhaustive formulation of the Guardian brand cf. the “Living Our Values” section of their web site (http://

www.guardian.co.uk/values/0,,1166317,00.html), as well as their editorial code (http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-

iles/Guardian/documents/2007/06/14/EditorialCode2007.pdf)

4 The Guardian, ”Awards” [web page] under Guardian Print Centre > Awards. Copyright: Guardian News and Media

Ltd. 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/gpc/awards [accessed on 2010-03-01].

5 cf. these two articles: Patrick Burgoyne, “Guardian Gives Shape to Obama’s Words” on Creative Review: CR Blog

[the journal’s weblog], posted January 19, 2009. http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/january/guardian-

gives-shape-to-obamas-words [accessed 2010-02-16 including reader comments]. Richard Turley, “Off the Grid”

[web page] on The Design Observer Group Sites: Observatory, posted July 7 2007, Copyright: Observer Media

LLC. http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=5667 [accessed 2010-02-16 including reader com-

ments]

6 Guardian News & Media, ”Circulation & Readership” [web page] under Advertising information from Guardian

News & Media > The Guardian > Circulation & Readership. http://www.adinfo-guardian.co.uk/the-guardian/guard-

ian-circulation-and-readership.shtml [accessed on 2010-03-01].

7 Sydsvenskan, ”Om Sydsvenskan” [web page]. http://sydsvenskan.se/obs/article93896/Om-Sydsvenskan-.html

[accessed on 2010-03-01].

8 Benjamin Peetre, “Så hittar du i nya formen” in Sydsvenskan [”Så funkar det” unique supplement], March 7th

2009, pp. 4-5.

9 Bruhn Family, “Portfolio: Sydsvenskan” [web page and slides]. http://www.bruhnfamily.com/portfolio/sydsvens-

kan.asp [accessed on 2010-03-01]

10 The best overview of the ield I have encountered is Lynne Cooke’s “A visual convergence of print, television, and

the internet: charting 40 years of design change in news presentation” in New Media & Society , February 2005,

Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 22-46.

11 Mario R. Garcia & Pegie Stark, Eyes On the News , St. Petersburg, FL: The Poynter Institute for Media Studies,

1991.

12 For Smith’s study and a summary of the other two cf. Ron F. Smith, “How Design and Color Affect Reader Judg-

ment of Newspapers” in Newspaper Research Journal , 1989, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 75-86.

13 Kevin G. Barnhurst, Seeing the Newspaper . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

14 Robert Craig, “Ideological Aspects of Publication Design” in Design Issues , MIT Press, Spring 1990, Vol. 6, No. 2,

pp. 18-27.

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