STUDY ON THE FRONT PAGE LAYOUT DESIGN OF SHUNPAO DURING 1872-1911

Abstract

This paper takes altogether 40 front pages on every April 30th in the solar calendar each year of Shun Pao during 1872 to 1911 collected in Shanghai Library as the samples. Thus to explore the characteristics of font type and regularity principles of newspaper lines form arrangement by dint of literatures such as Sciences of Editions and History of Printing via observing, combing and analyzing. The study found that: Shun Pao Newspaper achieved constant layout design innovation upon the introduction of the founder, British people's advanced editing concepts and techniques with the change in Chinese local aesthetic conceptions. The names of the newspaper were displayed in the middle part at the top titled in calligraphy font with the characters in upsizing in the late Qing Dynasty. As for the master head, header and text part of the column, the printing characters were displayed by types in two font matrixes and sizes in 0.48*0.48 cm and 0.35*0.35 cm in the right-to-left arrangement. The layout for the first and second lines of the body text was mainly leaving four blank spaces at the beginning, or three blank spaces came second. The basic columns were varied from one column to multi-columns successively. Great differences were presented in the character sizes, letter-spacing and arrangement form between the publication date and the page number of the newspaper of the day. The layout arrangement developed in an evolution from book form to modern newspaper form.