mario garcia
Italics: not just for features At one point, perhaps in the 1950s, italics were mostly found in the “Women’s” section of the newspaper. Fifty years later, thanks to newsroom legacy syndrome, the rumor persists: italics are not macho enough, you should never use them for sports stories, and never on hard news stories. And so one still sees italics restricted to articles about flower arrangement, new recipes for quiche, and the latest fashions from Paris. It is time to give italics a bit of credit. Readers do not perceive italics as being less forceful —it is the words that make a headline strong or weak. And readers do not slow down when the headline is in italics. So they can be useful as long as you follow a few guidelines:
Give italics a job to do through your creation of story structures. In other words, do not use italics for a feature today and for an opinion piece tomorrow, and then for a lead international story the next. Whatever their particular use happens to be, they should be used consistently and continuously in that role. Avoid excessive use of italics for text. Italics are more suitable for headlines, quotes, and highlights, but are not as attractive in text size.
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pure design
What a little slant can do: When we converted The San Francisco Examiner from a traditional broadsheet to a vibrant and colorful tabloid, one of the best decisions made was to consider italics for headlines, not just for features, but for news as well. Especially on double page spreads, like the one shown here, italics bring a certain elegance, a change of rhythm, and visual movement to the page.
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