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Who Does Bastard Measures Right?
Let’s turn a critical eye on the lowly bastard measure. We’ll start with a definition … in case someone has strayed upon this who probably shouldn’t have…
Let’s turn a critical eye on the lowly bastard measure.
We’ll start with a definition … in case someone has strayed upon this who probably shouldn’t have.
Every newspaper has a grid. Common grids are five or six columns wide, although grids of 10 or 12 are used, and hybrid approaches should be more fully explored here in the future. A standard newspaper column (one leg of type in a news story) usually is placed on the grid, so that a six-column grid has six legs of type if the story stretches across the entire page. This is probably the most common set up. If a 10- or 12-column grid were used, the leg of type would stretch across two grid columns. A bastard measure is any leg of type that strays from the standard width in use in the newspaper.
If you ever stumble across a truly small-town newspaper that obviously doesn’t pay well or care about how the newspaper looks, you will probably see more bastard measures. The reasons for this stem from inexperienced designers who would rather fit a story than trim it or ponder about different design possibilities. Time is tight at a small newspaper. Editors stuck doing layout don’t have the same luxury of time or inclinations that designers do at larger papers.
The danger in using bastard measures is that not only are the stories difficult to read, but the design itself also loses its coherence, and the paper loses the appearance of credibility.
Readers like order. They like good design.
The danger in refusing to stray from the grid, though, in my opinion, is that sizing of photos is more limited. The page can also lose dynamic tension and variety.
More and more, on section fronts, I am warming to the bastard measure.
I credit the San Jose Mercury News for focusing my attention on it. Browse a recent collection of their front pages here. I noticed after their last redesign that they seemed to pay less and less attention on section fronts to the standard column width. And often I liked the result.
What has the Mercury News done, though, that makes it work?
I noticed a few other trends with their front page design. The designers there rarely inset information and photos into their legs of type. And there are often plenty of narrow columns of breakout information combined with the wider bastard measures. This information is not inset, but set alongside.
Here are a few tips for using bastard measures:
- Keep them to open pages and section fronts
- If you are going to run a bastard measure on several stories, look for ways to use the same bastard measure for both. If you find you have given yourself one story that is 13p3 wide and another that is 15p2, see if you can use a middle ground for both. Sometimes I will use a lot of stories at 14p or 16p or so, effectively making that my standard for the day, and have just one that remains the normal width.
- Don’t worry about keeping your standard columns on the grid. Just keep them to the right width. Use photo size to make up the difference.
- Conversely, try sticking to the grid but varying your column widths. Personally, I have had not had as much luck with this approach, but in theory, it’s great. I find that the standard distance between the use of rules on the page and other elements such as legs of type inevitably forces me off the grid.
Who else does bastard measures well? I’d like to hear of other good examples.
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Browsing through recently past SJMN A1s I see about half of their bastard measures work while the other half don’t—in my opinion. On the 17 Dec. edition it works as a breakout and helps enliven the grid. (They use the exact same device on other days as well.) This page is just great. But the very next day, the photo treatement doesn’t work (again, IMO). It just looks wrong to me. I find myself with the irrational urge to click on the photo and resize it back to a column and a half wide.
Here’s a good one.
DESIGNORATI
They are hard to do well. After I cited the Mercury News because this was the newspaper that had gotten me thinking about this, I noticed that recently they have not been doing a lot of it. Perhaps it is designer dependent. And about half the time I found it jarring in that paper as well. I do like the Indianapolis Star paper you point to there — the one wider rail down the right probably is the most typical use. I will look around for some more links that are a bit more unconventional and post them here soon.
About that Mercury News page you guys are talking about…the one that bothered you…I looked at it too, subjectively it doesn’t bother me so much, but it does seem to crowd out the content on the upper half of the page and make the layout as a whole top heavy. Is that the problem with this?
DESIGNORATI
I was just over at Newseum’s front pages site http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/ and came across the Hartford Courant from today and the Press Telegram out of Long Beach. Both are located on the left side of the first page of images (third one down in far left and fourth one down second space from the left). The Hartford Courant is a good example of bastard measures done well. It is hard to actually tell what grid they are using, which I am starting to consider a trend with Page A1 design. The Press Telegram, on the other hand, has ruined its front page with bastard measures. There is no excuse for changing a story stripped across the top of their front page into 3-columns wide. And every other measure on the page just adds to the visual confusion and ugliness. I hope this is not one of their normal A1 designers, because whoever did it has no business being an A1 designer.
I am a bit unclear as to exactly which Merc pages Pariah was refering to. Dates?
One correction … Hartford Courant is the fourth row down, third image from the left …
Pariah seems to be referring to the SJMN A1s from the 17th, 19th and 18th of December, in that order.
I’m looking at the Press-Telegram for today and I think I see what you mean there. There’s a story about a gun-happy park ranger just under the masthead that spans the entire page, a family tragedy sprawls across from the middle 3/4ths of the left side partway into the last column into a story about national politics, which is being crowded upward by a photo of a small child. It’s very chaotic and comes off sloppy.
I’m guessing it’s a five-column grid based on the story in the lower eft hand part of the page, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe the column width just seems subjectively “natural” to me.
The most irritating part of the whole layout is the rule at the bottom of the right hand column of the top story which extends over the big story on the left and in the middle (it’s right over the “Bush…” headline”. It doesn’t respect the layout or seems to be done for any reason. It just seems jammed in there.
DESIGNORATI
Newseum.org is a very cool site, but something I feel compelled to point out to Firefox users is that you need to enable popups for that site or the front page view window won’t open for you.
DESIGNORATI
I just did find one good example of a paper that seems to understand bastard measures (sorry to prattle on, but I just came up with a good one, I think…)
The front page of today’s (24 Dec 05) Salem Statesman Journal could be stood next to the Press-Telegram and it would be like night and day. It looks like the S-J looks like a six-column grid, but the majority of the page, the middle third plus a bit, has one grid-conforming story (on the left), a big bastarded (is that a word) story in the middle, breaking the grid, and a story on the right that fills in the rest of the space across the middle.
The clever thing about the big major story (head: “State still struggles to keep everyone fed”) is that there are two stories underneath the major illustration…one obeys the grid, and the other is bastard.
But the whole page, despite the bastard measures, feels thought-out, put together, and logical. The rules are used with extreme knowledge and give structure but don’t decrease the dynamic feel of the page.
DESIGNORATI
I can’t seem to find online images of the Stateman Journal’s front pages.
When thinking about grids, it’s important to remember that each column of a grid doesn’t necessarily define the column width. Many papers use six columns of copy, but they’re set on a 12-col grid. That gives freedom to change up certain parts of the layout—a long rail of interior content teasers, a rail of weather or sports scores, then one story set as 3- or 4-col whereas the same overall area serves 6-8 cols above and/or below.
Then, of course, there are irregular grids—1.25-col wide colums on the sides, for example. You won’t likely see that in finanical U.S. or any German papers, but irregular (and more interesting) grids are appearing in more and more U.S. papers. Spain (as I recall [it might be Italy, though]) is very accomplished at making complex irregular grids work.
There’s a lot of space in the average broadsheet, and designers can get creative if they have, first, a solid knowledge of news design rules and principles, and, second, a little hutzpah.
DESIGNORATI
Pariah:
I found them on Newseum.org. What I can’t seem to find is whether or not they have past frontpages.
Thanks for pointing all that out, reminding me that the actual grid modules may actually be smaller than the column width. I do remember being taught that you want to, for instance, make a three-column layout you’d want to consider having the grid twelve modules across so as to give you more options for design.
DESIGNORATI
Yup. Designorati, in its current state, is an asymmetrical 5-column grid. Our half-col illos are actually 1-col wide, while the main guts column is 2-cols wide.
DESIGNORATI