Peter Palazzo, Art Director For Newspapers, 78
DGH
Peter Palazzo, an editorial art director who redesigned The New York
Herald Tribune in 1963 and helped start a genre that he called
journalistic design, and who would have been 79 on February 2, 2005,
died on January 30, 2005, in Glens Falls, New York, the cause of death
being cancer, according to his wife, Danielle, at the age of 78.
In 1963, when Mr. Palazzo was hired to reformat the foundering Sunday
edition of The Tribune, most newspapers were rigidly, and often
blandly, composed by editors who were not trained as designers or art
directors. Originally an advertising designer, Mr. Palazzo was asked to
create a typographic format that would distinguish The Tribune from its
competitors. He broke with tradition when he combined newspaper layout
principals and magazine display presentation, including larger images,
increased white space, and elegant headline composition.
It was a calculated risk.
"One must be very careful about tampering" with the readers' habits,
"which have built up over a long period of time," he wrote in 1964 in
Print magazine. But since The Tribune had been steadily losing Sunday
circulation to The New York Times, Jim Bellows, editor of The Tribune,
took a chance that Mr. Palazzo's concept to design all the Sunday
sections for "individual identification and unified appearance" would
transform the archaic-looking pages into something modern that would
attract new readers.
On the front page, Mr. Palazzo replaced the conventional news stories,
set in monotonous narrow columns, with a summary of world, national and
local events in a wide column of type with bold subheading down the
left side of the page. Wider columns and gutters (the spaces between
columns) throughout the paper made it more legible compared with the
tightly packed eight columns of type in The New York Times of that era.
Mr. Palazzo used only one typeface, Caslon, because "of the instant
impression of integrity it gives to the news," he wrote. The
photographs were also noticeably larger. The new modular design was so
airy that readers initially complained that they could not take it
seriously. But prefiguring responses to today's information glut, The
Tribune's design provided readers with signposts that guided them
through the paper.
In addition to remaking the hard-news sections, Mr. Palazzo helped
start the typographically elegant Book World and the original New York
Magazine as regular Sunday supplements to The Tribune. For Book World
Mr. Palazzo rejected The Times Book Review's habit of using famous
artworks and instead commissioned conceptual illustrations by
contemporary illustrators. Despite an increase in circulation, the new
Tribune did not last long. In 1963 a crippling newspaper strike forced
an unhappy merger of three papers, The Tribune, The New York World and
The Journal American, creating The World Journal Tribune, which failed
to garner a sizable audience and did not survive.
Peter Palazzo was born in Manhattan, New York, on February 2, 1926, and
grew up on Staten Island, New York, where his father was a milkman.
After two years in the Army Air Force he studied advertising at Cooper
Union in Manhattan. His first job was designing theatrical fliers and
posters. Later he designed Amerika, a Russian-language magazine
published by the State Department.
His first big break as design director came when he was hired to create
newspaper ads for the I. Miller shoe chain, and he commissioned a young
freelance artist named Andy Warhol to make shaky line drawings of legs
and shoes. The ads won numerous awards. He was then creative director
at Henri Bendel until moving to The Tribune
In the years that followed he started Peter Palazzo Associates and was
a newspaper design consultant for The Chicago [Illinois] Daily News,
The Providence [Rhode Island] Journal, The Winnipeg [Canada] Tribune
and The Edmonton [Canada] Journal. He designed the prototype for an
afternoon edition of The Daily News in New York, which was never
published, and a Sunday section for The New York Post. He also created
formats and covers for Forbes, Psychology Today and Family Circle
magazines. In 1994 he designed a family of typefaces called Palazzo for
The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Palazzo is survived by a daughter,
Katherine, of Scottsdale, Arizona; two sons, Peter, also of Scottsdale,
and Anthony, of Austin, Texas; and a grandchild.
NY Times