Contemporary Editorial

Editorial layout borrows credibility from magazines. A big serif and a photograph read as a feature rather than an advert, and readers trust features.

It also makes an ordinary event look expensive for free. The only asset it needs is one decent photograph.

Set the headline enormous, in a high-contrast serif, tight tracking, two lines maximum. It should take a third of the sheet.

One photograph, full bleed or in a clean rectangle, and nothing layered on top of it except perhaps the kicker.

Add a small all-caps sans kicker above the headline, hairline rules to separate blocks, and keep the margins wide. Two typefaces total: one serif, one sans.

Use it for a supper club, a talk, a gallery, a wine tasting, a wedding fair, a premium product, anything that wants to read grown-up.

Leave it alone for a children's event or a jumble sale. It reads aloof, and it needs a good photograph that most small events do not have.

Swiss Style bans the serif and keeps everything flush left on a visible grid. Editorial allows the serif and loosens the grid for effect.

Monochrome plus a single accent drops the photograph entirely and relies on type alone.

Japanese minimal leaves far more empty space and uses a much smaller headline.

Alexey Brodovitch's Harper's Bazaar spreads from 1934 to 1958 set the rules that magazines still use. The current version is easiest to see in The Gentlewoman and Kinfolk, where a single image and one very large serif do the whole page.

The model returns a timid headline. Say the headline is very large, tightly tracked, and fills a third of the sheet.

The other failure is text laid over a busy photograph. Ask for either a full-bleed image with the type in a clear margin, or a clean rectangle of image with the type outside it.