The Boston Globe Calendar Section Redesign
Event Listings Typography
In the old Calendar, even if you found the calendar event listing you were interested in, reading it was often difficult. This was especially true if the event were happening at an institution that had a lot of events or event venues, such as the Museum of Science. When an individual event listing was long, there were no typographical devices helping to organize or break up the text, and the organization of the information often seemed haphazard.
An additional challenge in the old format was that the listings text had a small hanging indent at the start of each paragraph and the text was rag right. This meant that both sides of the column had a wavy edge. With five columns going across the page, this gave the text an uneven and unstable feeling. And it made the listings even harder to read.
The body text was difficult to read and often fell apart on press. Nevertheless, the editor was hoping to be able to fit in more listings in the same amount of space. (Note: The text examples you see above are at 150% actual size.)
Solutions Proposed
How to address this myriad of difficulties? I spent a tremendous amount of time meeting with listings editors and understanding the wide variety of formatting challenges they faced when formatting event information. If a given event took place on one day, in one place and had just one price, the question was not so difficult. Even several events taking place on different days in one location did not pose too much of a problem (see "Phoenix Landing" example above). But how to handle a situation where one "location" had several internal venues, multiple dates and times, numerous programs and program descriptions, and different prices for each? In the old format, the typographical tools did not exist to address these challenges, but formatting guidelines were not there either. The overall system was somewhat adhoc.
Developing a systematic approach to both the typography and the formatting and order of content emerged as a central focus of the project. To make the listings easier to scan, I introduced the dates in bold numerical format. This made them stand out from the rest of the descriptive text so that readers could easily jump to view a date they might be interested in.
I also created typographic levels for locations with multiple venues. The guiding principle for the ordering of listings content was that the information that applied to the listing as a whole should come first, and then information that was venue- or date-specific should appear afterwards. In this way, the listing information was intended to be presented in a cascading sequence, starting with the most general and moving to the most specific. A detailed style guide was created outlining examples of both simple and complex listing formulations, and describing how to apply the typographic tools in various situations.
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