New York Times Chooses New Font To Cope With The Great Recession

The New York Times June 14 issue of their magazine was 9% smaller to cope with high paper costs and their decline in revenues during what they are calling the “Great Recession”. To ensure that there is still the same volume of content though, the New York Times has changed its typeface to Lyon Text which it says allows them to print almost as many words on the page as the previous format (well, they actually said “you’d hardly know the difference” which sounds more ad-agency than newspaper, no?).

A piece on the designer Kai Bernau’s site explains the background to the development of this typeface:

The Lyon family of typefaces was originally Kai’s graduation project in the Type]Media master programme, based on historical models of the 16th century punch cutter Robert Granjon.

Some time after the course, the family was completely rethought as a contemporary book and publication typeface that reflects our convictions about modern digital typeface design: A decisively digital outline treatment that reveals our modern repertoire of tools, and the typeface itself as a modern design tool, paired with a certain Times-like unobtrusiveness in text sizes, contrastes nicely with Lyon’s 16th century heritage.

Lyons Type