1967 | A Modern Identity Takes Form in Ancient Lettering

The New York Times has begun testing a new home screen design on a small sample of its audience. The goal is to “gather feedback from both the newsroom and readers while making further adjustments,” the staff was told in a memo this week.

One element will not be adjusted: the nameplate that has come to be the visual synonym of The Times. It was most recently redrawn in 1967 by the designer Edward Benguiat, working with Louis Silverstein, who was then the promotion director of The Times. (Mr. Silverstein would later become an assistant managing editor.)

The letterforms on which the nameplate is based, known as blackletter or Gothic, can be traced to the late 700s, long before Gutenberg ever put ink to type.

“We pride ourselves in preserving long held values while continually adapting to new technologies and media consumption behavior,” Tom Bodkin, the creative director of The Times, said this week. “We feel the nameplate continues to be a highly effective signifier for our company.”

“It is a highly recognizable representation of our brand,” he said. “While it has been transformed over the years into a cleaner, more modern presentation, it references a long and distinguished history.”

That’s an understatement.

To follow the story of the nameplate, you have to start with the great Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin, in league with the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne, under whose direction monks developed letterforms known as Carolingian.

“With the dissolution of Charlemagne’s empire came regional variations upon Alcuin’s script,” John Kane wrote in “A Type Primer.” “In northern Europe, a condensed, strongly vertical letterform known as blackletter or textura (for the woven effect it produced on a page of text) gained popularity.”

Johannes Gutenberg adopted this letterform for the movable, reusable type he developed in the 15th century. You might say that’s when it became a typeface.

We’ll skip ahead a bit, through the European colonization of America and the American War of Independence, to the moment in 1851 when Henry Jarvis Raymond had to choose a nameplate for his new newspaper, the “New-York Daily Times.”

“Henry Raymond wanted to model The Times as closely as possible on The London Times, which used Gothic type with a period,” a 1958 in-house history explained.

So the blackletter nameplate was part of our identity from Volume 1, Number 1.

Beginning Sept. 14, 1857, the newspaper was styled “The New-York Times” instead of “New-York Daily Times,” and the nameplate changed accordingly.

Raymond was 15 years in his grave when the next big change occurred, on Jan. 6, 1884. The guys in the composing room just went nuts — relatively speaking. The terminals of the “N,” the “r” and the “s” were exaggerated into swashes so extravagant they almost wrapped around themselves.

Everything calmed down in the nameplate that made its debut on Jan. 15, 1894. Terminals were trimmed. Edges were smoothed. And the thin vertical stem that seems to support the upper arm of the “T” was given an arrow-like ornament that it would carry for the next 73 years.

After Adolph S. Ochs took over The Times, his first big change to the nameplate was in punctuation, not typography. On Dec. 1, 1896, the hyphen was dropped between “New” and “York.” Cups of tea probably clattered to parquet floors all over the finer precincts of the city when this grammatical horror was unveiled, leaving the New-York Historical Sociey among the few institutions to uphold grammatical standards.

On Dec. 30, 1914, the descender of the “h” was almost indiscernibly shortened.

And that was pretty much the state of affairs until Feb. 21, 1967, when Mr. Benguiat’s bold, robust redrawing was introduced, most notably with a diamond in place of the arrow in the bowl of the “T.”

In a 2001 interview with Andrew Shalat for Macworld, Mr. Benguiat said: “Lou Silverstein was the art director. His thought was, ‘Change it.’ My thought was, ‘O.K., we’ll change it — but if we change it, nobody will recognize it.’ So all I did was take it and fix it.”

The typographer Matthew Carter recalled this week that Mr. Benguiat’s original work was a photocomposition font kept for the exclusive use of The Times by Photo-Lettering Inc., where Mr. Benguiat worked.

(At the Photo-Lettering shop in Murray Hill, pen-and-ink letterforms were converted into photographic negatives on film or glass plates. These were used in turn to expose photo sensitive paper with the desired letters. A terrific history can be found on the website of House Industries, which controls Photo-Lettering’s assets.)

When Roger Black was the art director of The New York Times Magazine in the 1980s, he commissioned the letterform designer Jim Parkinson to redraw the magazine logo. “I never touched the Page 1 logo,” Mr. Black said.

Ditto, Mr. Carter, though he redrew the magazine logo, working with Janet Froelich when she was the magazine’s creative director. He based his design principally on Mr. Benguiat’s original.

Collaborating with Mr. Bodkin and Kelly Doe, who is The Times’s design director for brand identity, Mr. Carter also designed a new nameplate for The International Herald Tribune and its successor, The International New York Times.

“The lettering, again, was closely based on Ed’s original design but with a few revisions such as reducing the size of the final ‘s’ that was visibly too big in the original,” Mr. Carter said. “The nameplate of The New York Times itself remained unchanged.”

That’s not to say it was regarded as perfect, as Mr. Black recalled. “Some designers objected to the ‘Germanization’ of the lettering style, which was sharper and heavier and had more contrast than the ‘Old English’ version it replaced,” he said.

But the real uproar in 1967 was over the loss of the period in the nameplate.

“How would you like to wake up and find your wife’s face had changed?” one of the angry letter writers asked The Times. “No tittle in your title?” asked another. Someone else wondered, “Why scrub a period in history?”

The redesign was like “performing plastic surgery on Helen of Troy,” another reader complained.” Still another lamented the punctuated nameplate as a grand old landmark that had “vanished into oblivion.”

Besides conferring a slightly more modern look, however, the elimination of the period saved ink. And saving ink saved money. John Radosta, who was then the picture editor, worked with a professor at New York University to determine — their tongues in cheek — that not printing the period would spare The Times $41.28 in costs each year.

Budget-cutting, like the nameplate, has a long and distinguished history here.