Crimson Goes Color in 130th Year

After 130 years of staid blacks and musty grays, The Harvard Crimson features actual crimson—and the full spectrum of colors—on its front page today, marking a new era for the University’s daily newspaper.

The Crimson also unveils a complete redesign in today’s issue to accompany the changeover.

Press units installed in the newspaper’s basement over winter break enable the broadsheet to publish up to four pages in full-color—introducing cyan, magenta and yellow to The Crimson’s presses for the first time since in-house printing began in 1895.

Leaning over test copies pouring out of the presses last week, Crimson President Amit R. Paley ’04 and press operator Brian M. Byrne sported hands stained with ink and newsprint as Byrne tweaked contrast levels and discussed the logistics of color publication.

“Monday’s going to be a big test,” Byrne said in advance of today’s inaugural color issue.

Paley, whose tenure has been marked by a year-long effort to imbue the newspaper with color, hailed the change as vital for The Crimson’s readership.

“It was just pretty clear that it’s an important service to provide to our readers,” Paley said.

All told, The Crimson has devoted roughly $400,000 to the project, including the purchase and installation of the new Goss Community presses which now print the first two and last two pages of the newspaper.

The Crimson’s ongoing capital campaign is expected to cover the expenses of the changeover to color and redesign, Paley said.

Crimson Graduate Board Chair William L. Pollak ’79 said the new technology justified the vast expense.

“There’s always been a feeling that we want the students who work at The Crimson to work with equipment, maybe not of the cutting edge, but at least that which you would find out in the real world,” Pollak said.

The concurrent redesign has treated The Crimson to a complete makeover.

Those involved with the redesign said the changes—including summary boxes, more sub-headlines and teasers at the top of the front page—were intended to appeal to readers who may only scan the newspaper each day, as well as those who delve far into every story.

“We’re really just creating more entry points for our readers, for however much time they have,” Paley said.

The Color Crimson

The newspaper’s new look, which extends onto inside black-and-white pages as well, maintains The Crimson’s historically classic tone, often employing color only as an accent.

“For a paper that’s pretty traditional and by-and-large pretty conservative [in its design], you want to show some restraint in using color,” said Ron Reason of Garcia Media, the firm employed by The Crimson to consult on the redesign.

That philosophy largely mirrors the same firm’s redesign of The Wall Street Journal in 2002, which also introduced color to the front page of the newspaper.

“This has sort of been the Wall Street Journal of college newspapers for us,” said Jennifer A. George-Palilonis, also of Garcia Media.

Still, the redesign touches all aspects of the newspaper’s layout—from the creation of an in-house Crimson red to new headline fonts to graphic-heavy designs like today’s spread on mental health.

The new design elements, in appealing to scanning eyes, follow a growing trend toward reader-friendly layouts among collegiate and professional newspapers. But Crimson executives and outside consultants involved with the redesign were adamant that content would not be sacrificed by the new look.

“You need that style to get the substance out of it,” Paley said. “There’s not really a trade-off.”

The redesign represents the first large-scale design change at the newspaper since 1991 and the most significant alteration since January 1974, when The Crimson began using its own offset press.

‘Brute Force and Finesse'

The new arrangement at The Crimson retains most of the 1974 equipment.

But installing the new color units in the quirky basement caverns of The Crimson’s 14 Plympton St. home required a mix of “brute force and finesse,” according to Tom Loesch, president of Impressions Worldwide, which supplied and installed the new equipment.

“I think one of the things I suggested when we met over a year ago was getting the press the hell out of the basement,” recalled Loesch. “The location actually really determined the parameters of the expansion. We were quite limited as to what we could do.”

Workers, however, managed to rig a gantry system to lower the five-ton units—described by Loesch as “late ’80s, early ’90s technology”—into the basement.

With the new presses installed, Byrne’s job as The Crimson’s sole press operator, a position he has held for 22 years, has become suddenly more complicated.

“There’s an advanced skill level required and, frankly, an art to operating the new press,” said Loesch. “It’s a lot easier to hit the buttons and knock out a black-and-white press run.”

Byrne, who spent last week trying his hand at the new presses, acknowledged that color publication would require more skill—and time—on his part.

For each color page, Byrne must manually align the four colors on the newspaper and keep them in register throughout the press run.

Today’s issue of The Crimson features color on the front pages of the daily and sports sections, with the hope that color will expand to the second and last pages of the broadsheet sections in coming days and weeks.

“Amit, if he had his way, would go straight to four pages of color,” Byrne said, referring to the current Crimson president. “I’d end up putting him through the press.”

Fifteen Minutes, The Crimson’s weekly magazine, will begin publishing with a new color design in February.

From Magenta to Crimson

Editors at The Crimson—who often, like all journalists, refer to adding “color” to daily news stories—previously have never had the option of adding real color to their articles, whether in the form of cream shading behind news text or color photography adjacent to articles.

When The Crimson was born in 1873, known then as The Magenta in accordance with the College’s official color of the time, what would become the nation’s oldest continually published college newspaper was still a far cry from the operation at 14 Plympton St. today.

After moving from four to five columns in 1920, The Crimson used its own hot-type presses with hired typists setting increasingly arcane lead type.

Former Crimson President Osborne F. Ingram ’35 recalled sending his finished stories down a chute in the newsroom to the typists in the basement.

“When they were out of copy downstairs, they would bang on the chute,” Osborne said.

In recent decades, the chute has been replaced by building-wide servers which electronically transmit articles from reporters in the newsroom to designers in the basement.

Over its storied, 131-year history, The Crimson has undergone various design changes—from a scattered front-page layout throughout the 1960s to the more formulaic design of the 1990s.

The new look emerges from a semester’s worth of work, as editors critiqued design proposals submitted by the consulting firm.

Along with Paley, Design Chairs Ellen E. Ching ’04 and Christine C. Yokoyama ’04 headed up an executive committee that sought input from the entire staff.

Test runs on the press over the past week have allowed Crimson executives to play with the final version of the redesign and acquaint themselves with the newspaper’s new features.

“What the reader sees on Monday...is going to be the product of quite a lot of debate and discussion,” Reason said.

Ongoing implementation of the redesign will be spearheaded by incoming Design Chairs Hayley B. Barna ’05 and Michael R. Conti ’05, who—along with the rest of The Crimson’s 131st Guard—assume their positions at the end of the month.

Both the outgoing and incoming Crimson executives will likely keep well-attuned to reaction among the newspaper’s readership, and initial sentiment may not be as warm as the colors on The Crimson’s new front page, according to George-Palilonis.

“People get attached to their newspapers, and sometimes it’s difficult to get comfortable with change,” George-Palilonis said.

“People get freaked out.”

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.

DISSECTING THE FRONT PAGE

1. Three inside story teasers above the masthead direct readers’ attention to important or interesting stories inside the newspaper.

2. Story labels will run above stories about recurring topics to help readers locate pieces about issues of interest.

3. Section teasers on the front page will provide information about inside sections and their major stories.

4. Informational graphics will accompany stories where relevant to provide more visual information for our readers and help illustrate the topics at issue in the story.

5. Inside coverage boxes will alert readers to related coverage elsewhere within the paper.

6. Featured stories will run daily, highlighting stories of special interest to our readers.

7. An improved index box runs across the bottom of the page, directing readers to standard items inside the paper.

Information Layering

To better serve all types of readers, Crimson editors, reporters and designers will work to package stories in various formats. Readers will see an increased number of informational graphics, labeling devices and alternative story structures. This method of information layering is meant to make the paper more active and to help our scanning readers find the news they are most interested in. The two versions of the front page below demonstrate the multiple layers of information designed to serve this purpose. The figure on the right displays the visual elements that a cursory glance at the front page would first reveal.