Headlines 2 - Jessica Bischoff

My editing mistake this week was found in our very own Weber State Signpost. “Nevada citizens where faces with another decision regarding their state’s laws...”

My theory on how this was overlooked is that since it is in the first paragraph, the editor probably read it quickly, and gave more attention to the body of the article. This error is just a spelling mistake from writing and editing quickly, so there is not much to learn to correct it as if it were a usage error, other than just taking your time.

I am in a visual communication class as well, and was surprised to see a section in our reading on typeface. This is something we learned in that class when designing because typeface is the vessel you portray your message through. You don’t want it to be too distracting, so people still pay attention to the audience, but you also want to catch the eye.

I learned more about how this works in the news writing world, because certain stories may require more attention than others. Visually designing newspapers is something that may be overlooked, but I now understand how important it is. Balancing serif and sans serif fonts, as well as making decisions on the size of type each headline requires. Then you must choose a font to portray the correct tone.

There is a lot more involved with how the design of a headline affects the impact of a story because it may determine who sees it or how urgent it looks. After reading through the “Writing headlines” supplemental reading I went through a copy of The New York Times, and was surprised to see that the headlines on the front page were all different designs. One was printed in all caps and bolded. Another was Italicized in a serif font. I noticed serif was the font of choice, which reflects another thing I learned in Vis. Comm. Serifs are easier to read in big blocks of text like articles because the small serif, which is the projecting feature off the letter, is easier to read as each serif flows onto the next letter more smoothly.