Annals of Typographic Oddity: Mourning Becomes Helvetica

It isn’t often that The New York Times runs a 6-column headline on the front page. This kind of editorial real estate is typically reserved for something cataclysmic — a coup d’etat, for instance — and looks goofy and disproportionate sitting next to banal features like, say, the metropolitan weather forecast. (Especially this week, when early results from the “Super-Tuesday” primaries here in the US offered anonymous speculation that John Edwards would drop out of the race. Indeed! Neither coup nor etat.) Big, black, bold and italicized in ALL CAPS, this belt-and-suspenders approach to typography is perhaps all the more striking because it looks so lame. All the news that’s fit to print? Or all the news that prints to fit? Headline writing is neither an art NOR a science, but the real question is this: despite the tremendous developments in display type over the past quarter century, haven’t we progressed further than this?