Many years ago, when Robertson Davies delivered his Tanner lectures (Reading and Writing), he spoke at length about his own role as a newspaper editor. One of his tasks was to make readable the letters from myriad readers. Davies observed: “When they were angry they seemed unable to focus their anger; they roared like lions, and like lions they roared on no identifiable note. When they wished to express grief they fell into cliché and trivialised their sincere feeling by the awful prose in which they expressed it. When they were soliciting money for charity, they pranced and cavorted in coy prose, or else they tried to make the reader’s flesh creep with tales of horrors that may have been true but did not sound true.”
Words and more
Our early morning routine of reading a newspaper is a much more complex tapestry. We are not mechanical receptacles of information, data, and policy prescriptions. We need something more to continue our engagement with a newspaper day after day. That elusive thing may be the pleasure of just not words but also an arresting design. If our editors make the prose readable, our designers come up with a template that includes photos, illustrations, graphics and various forms of data tables to sustain our interest in the act of reading. The Society for News Design (SND) celebrates these largely invisible artists from across the world from major newspapers with annual awards for various categories. The Hindu has won three awards of excellence this year, and has become the first Indian newspaper to do so.
Along with The New York Times, Politico and Die Zeit, The Hindu has won the SND’s Award of Excellence for News Story Illustration for its Ground Zero report, “Hyderabad’s LSD blues” (July 22, 2017). Deepak Harichandan, National Design Editor, was the illustrator for this full-page report. Though it had the potential for a photograph-based central visual, Mr. Harichandan thought an illustration would be more effective in capturing the alarming reality.
Mr. Harichandan’s challenge was to come up with a visual that was haunting to bring out the core subject: the youth’s submission to momentary pleasure and the price they pay for it. “The illustration that I came up with finally, after multiple rough drafts, has a central visual of a youth in a psychedelic state and the distorted perception of reality around him. Doodles are always a subconscious reflection of one’s self, and so I chose wobbly doodles around the central visual. The idea was to make the colours as stark and highly saturated as possible to reflect the state of mind of a drug user. Hence, the minimal use of colours around the explosion of colours in the central visual depicting the psychedelic,” he said.
Less is more
The Weekend Sport section won the Award of Excellence in News Design (Pages) in the category Sports, in Broadsheet, for the story “Does Ronaldo have a scoring problem?” (November 18, 2017). The minimalist design for the story that focussed on the star player’s lack of goals despite his high performance standards needed to incorporate a whole set of data, match analysis, the field configuration explaining the exact spot from which the player was shooting for the goal, among other details. According to Kannan Sundar, Deputy National Design Editor, the team could not find a single photograph that captured the current hiatus of Ronaldo. He said: “We wanted a fabulous fit between story and visual. The idea of ‘less is more’ was deployed to bring all the elements together — text, data, and illustration. For the central image, we went in for the Double Exposure technique to both literally and metaphorically capture the high-performing player’s less-than-apparent dry phase.”
The Hindu also won the Award of Excellence in Page Design for Individual Portfolio, in Sport. The Weekend Sport features on Usain Bolt, M.S. Dhoni, Maria Sharapova, Formula One, and Rafael Nadal were considered for this category. “The biggest strength of designing for sports is photography. It is sheer kinetics and drama. But to select that one defining photograph amidst hundreds is both the designer’s challenge and victory,” said Mr. Kannan. In a profession where space is premium, Weekend Sport is a double spread, free of advertisements, and has been the delight of our readers since its inception last year.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in