Headline design tips

Don’t believe everything you learned in journalism school; becoming great at headline design is a learning process with a lot of room for flexibility and creativity.

Are you making the most of your headline options? From font sizes and choices to different ways to layer information, here are some tips gleaned mainly from experience:

Headline size

• The basic rule of larger headlines at the top and smaller headlines at the bottom of the page is never wrong. There is plenty of room to experiment on the margins, however, and this should not be viewed as a hard and fast rule.
• Headline design often goes wrong by not varying point sizes enough across all stories on a page.
• I learned in journalism school to use the rough rule that the main headline on a story should be twice the size as the subhead or deck head (the secondary headline on the same story). In practice, I find this does not work with many fonts. As a general rule, I prefer more contrast between the two headline sizes, and usually use a smaller subhead than I was once taught to use. There probably should be an upper size limit on these deck heads. In practice, I very rarely use these at more than 36 points in size. Usually my subheads are closer to 22 to 30 points, depending on the size of the main headline. Once my main headline gets over 48 points, I find I need to be careful not to scale up my deck heads to half the size. Mistakes could be made by going too small or too large, but I feel usually the mistake is made by going too large with these secondary headlines. Your eyes should be able to guide you to a great extent.
• Be sure to build in enough vertical white space between your main headline and subheadline and body copy. Your newspaper probably has preset guidelines for this, and perhaps they are not perfect, but be careful not to crowd your headlines too closely together.
• Another rule that I was taught is that a headline should extend out to the end of the line, or very close to it. This is another rule that I find needs slight tweaking in some places. Headlines are better if they have a little room to breathe at the end, especially on an inside page with a lot of headlines. This is especially true if you find yourself hemmed into running bumping headlines, which usually can and should be avoided. Size down the headline on the left if necessary to give yourself some white space here. Design your headlines for plenty of contrast in this case as well.
• Newspapers usually either center all headlines or use them flush left as a rule. This is a style that you are stuck with, but if your newspaper runs its headlines flush left, then I believe centering a headline should always be an option on centerpiece stories and features. If you center the main headline, then center the subheadline as well.

Font and tone

The design of the headline can and should be a visual clue to the content of the story:

• When it is helpful to set the scene for a longer feature, it is wise to create display type that works to lure a reader into the story and goes beyond standard news headline treatment.
• A hard news story calls for a hard news font. If all of your stories on the page are hard-news stories, though, you should feel compelled to go beyond this rule to create some variety in your headline approaches.
• The tone of the headline absolutely should reflect the tone of the story. This is more important than presenting a complete picture of the story. While this is highly debatable, this is the order of priority I feel headline writers should use: Accuracy first, tone second, making a story browsable to get the main gist of the story third. If a story or column is written to be entertaining and flippant, the headline should be entertaining and flippant. I find speaking up when these don’t correlate is important, and having a good relationship with editors is important in these circumstances.
• Different type treatments, such as the use of small caps, all caps, hammer heads, kicker heads, the use of multiple subheads, and different ways to combine headline fonts should be discussed so that you have a general framework for understanding how much flexibility you generally have over your headline design.

Layering your display type

Layering information is an important part of creating a useful and browsable news page. Studies have shown that while display type is widely read, the actual stories are not. Your goal as a designer should be both to make the content of a story browsable and easy to understand, and to encourage readers to actually read the stories on the page.

• I try with each story to make sure there is enough headline space and display type such as captions, bulleted summaries, breakouts, graphics and pullquotes so that someone just browsing across the page can get a good understanding of what the story is about. If they are interested, they can read the story in depth; if they are not (and usually they are not), then they can get the basic info from the display type itself. Obviously, you should not place too many elements with any one story, but there should be a couple of layers on most stories on the section fronts.
• Be careful to keep your page orderly and easy to read, though. If too many elements are placed on the page, it may appear chaotic and unappealing rather than approachable with plenty of entry points. If the page is getting too disorganized, find ways to present your legs of body copy more cleanly, without too many intrusions directly into the body copy. Also, look for ways to unify your design, such as reducing bastard measures and sizing your mugs more uniformly.

Art headlines

Art headlines break out of traditional headline treatment with varying point sizes, the use of color, and perhaps a greater choice of font. Art headlines are used primarily on centerpiece features, and are designed around the way the lead art and space relate. These types of display headlines are so central to the way the design works that an editor not viewing or creating the overall design should probably not suggest them. The editor might be writing in a vacuum without a clear vision of how the headline, art and text will work together.

• If you are a designer and not an editor, write the art heads yourself so that they will fit into your design and show them to the editor. Be courageous about debating why some headlines won’t work visually.
• It is best to pre-empt any disagreement by being clear up front about what types of headlines will work with the design, content wise, size-wise and how it works in conjunction with the art itself.
• Most importantly, the art headline and the lead art need to work together to express one primary point.
• Don’t get too complicated with too many combinations of fonts, sizes, and colors. Vary one or two of these attributes for a cleaner and less distracting and chaotic look.

Those are a few ways to approach how to build variety of headline treatment and layering of information into your page design. As always, the content of the stories should determine how you choose among these options. If you feel you still need help with learning to tap a variety of headline approaches, create for yourself a staple of five or ten different types of treatments that will work for a variety of stories. These can be drawn upon when needed, or varied slightly.

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