A few days ago, I received the email of doom from our resident newsroom god, John C. Schroeder ’74.

“Who is going to make the dummy pages [for the Eclipse supplement]?”

A little piece of me died as I said ‘goodbye’ to my summer and ‘hello’ to redesigning The Sun’s magazine-style weekend supplement, Eclipse. It wasn’t until I sat down at my laptop and opened up Quark 7, our publishing software, that I began to feel a bit of excitement at the task before me. The Eclipse redesign, while daunting, basically gave me carte blanche to indulge my wildest creative fantasies about white space and sans-serif fonts. What more could a graphic designer want?

Wanted: A Venetian masculine type with a strong chin and distinct ligatures for an open-type relationship. Must be an ambitious ascender who can raise my baselines. No light weights or aliasing, please.

While the above may seem like a corny set-up for a “That’s what she said” joke, serious requests for certain typefaces run rampant on graphic designer forums. (Yes, those exist.) Every day, a graphic designer sits down at his or her computer, makes a text box and proceeds to contemplate the holy grail of designer life: the font type.

OK. In the words of my father, no more ‘hanky-panky’. Enough talking the talk and waxing poetic about design philosophy; it’s time to walk the design walk (more like a sidestep, really) for all you design aficionados out there. An introductory paragraph this dramatic can only introduce one subject: white space*.

As Assistant Design Editor Deborah Tan pointed out in her previous post,what you don’t see is just as important as what you do see in a newspaper.

Confession: I buy but never read The Economist, because I know the mere act of carrying it around will make me seem more intelligent than I actually am. Nothing screams a well-informed interest in Cuban politics quite like sans-serif fonts cleanly juxtaposed against the photo du jour on The Economist’s front cover. If you’ve ever judged a book, magazine, or newspaper by its cover, then you know that the design of a publication speaks volumes about its intended demographic.