Peter Palazzo; Art Director for Newspapers
Hyfler/Rosner
Peter Palazzo Dies at 78; Art Director for Newspapers
By STEVEN HELLER
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, died on Jan. 30 in Glens
Falls, N.Y. He would have been 79 on Feb. 2.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Danielle.
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 on Feb. 2, 1926, and
grew up on Staten Island, 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 Daily News, The Providence Journal, The Winnipeg
Tribune and The Edmonton 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, Ariz.; two sons, Peter,
also of Scottsdale, and Anthony, of Austin, Tex.; and a
grandchild.