Rudolf Wall’s paper, the Bonnier family and a tower in Marieberg.

The name means “news of the day”, and the paper is known by its initials, DN. English Wikipedia says Dagens Nyheter was founded in Stockholm by Rudolf Wall in December 1864, and that the opening issue came out on 23 December 1864. Swedish Wikipedia adds that Wall had worked earlier at Aftonbladet and at Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts Tidning, and that in its early years the paper was printed at a press owned by the publisher Albert Bonnier. English Wikipedia says DN became a joint stock company in 1874.

The Bonnier connection runs through the whole history, and the two language editions date it in different steps. English Wikipedia says the paper has been owned by the Bonnier Group since 1909, when Karl Otto Bonnier acquired the shares his family did not yet hold, and that his father Albert had held some shares since 1888. Swedish Wikipedia says Karl Otto Bonnier became a principal part-owner in 1901 and chairman of the board in 1909, and that he and his family became majority owners during the 1920s. It places the paper today inside Bonnier News, part of the Bonnier group. Mario R. García, writing on his blog in 2009, also described DN as part of the Bonnier Group.

The newsroom has moved three times within Stockholm. Swedish Wikipedia says the offices were at the outset on Regeringsgatan and that the paper moved to the Klara district in 1901. In 1964 the editorial staff moved into a new high-rise in Marieberg, known as DN-skrapan. English Wikipedia gives the architect as Paul Hedqvist and the tower’s height as 84 metres over 27 floors, and says that in 1996 the whole operation moved into the neighbouring building on Gjörwellsgatan, which Swedish Wikipedia describes as the former printing works of DN and Expressen. Swedish Wikipedia says Expressen was started in 1944 as a subsidiary of DN, and English Wikipedia says the two papers share the building.

The paper also lends its name to events in the city. Swedish Wikipedia says the open-air DN-konserten on Gärdet, staged with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, began on 10 August 1975 and is held every year.

A founder’s full stop, a house Bodoni and a grotesque for the tabloid.

The title carries a piece of punctuation. Swedish Wikipedia says the paper writes its name in the masthead as DAGENS NYHETER. and, citing the paper’s own masthead box, that Rudolf Wall chose this himself: both words are the paper’s name and so take capitals, and the name is also a complete sentence and so ends with a point. In running text, the same article says, the full stop is dropped but both words keep their capitals.

The type behind the title is documented in more detail. Mario R. García, writing on The Mario Blog in August 2009, says he was asked in 2000 by the then editor Joachim Berner to redesign the paper, and that DN already had a long working relationship with the type designer Örjan Nordling. Nordling created DN Bodoni exclusively for the paper. García’s post adds that DN had used Berthold’s Akzidenz Grotesk increasingly over twenty years, paired with Bauer Bodoni until 1996 and with Berthold Bodoni from 1997 to 2000.

The next step came with a change of format. García writes that in 2002 DN’s managers decided to convert the paper to tabloid, a design carried out by John Bark of Bark Design, and that Nordling was asked to produce a sans serif. In the interview, Nordling says DN Grotesk was meant mainly for headlines, subheads and introductions, with a lowercase x-height matched to DN Bodoni and shortened ascenders and descenders to save space. He names as sources specimens from Caslon and Son, the German foundry Woellmer, Doric Grotesk and Consul Grotesk, the last found in DN’s own archives, and credits Consul Grotesk with details such as the backward-leaning top of the lowercase f and the oblique cuts on a, c, e and s. The post credits the Pangea design team of Nordling, Göran Söderström and Fredrik Andersson.

DN Grotesk then reached a wider market. García’s post says it was taken into the FontFont library as FF Dagny, with lower stroke contrast for small sizes, redrawn characters and a range of weights from Thin upwards. Nordling explains the name: Dagny is an abbreviation of Dagens Nyheter and also an old Nordic female name meaning “new day”.

A newer family followed two decades after DN Bodoni. The Swedish foundry Letters from Sweden says that in 2023 it made DN Serif and DN Sans together with the paper: the serif in three optical sizes with seven weights and italics, the sans in six weights with italics, and variable fonts for both. The foundry says DN Serif combines Bodoni and Times with traits taken from the newspaper’s logotype, that DN Sans follows the conventions of grotesque typefaces, and that both inherit elements of DN Bodoni.

A title with a full stop above a house Bodoni.

Much of a newspaper’s identity sits below the nameplate, in the system that organises its pages. A column grid decides how many stories fit across a spread, how wide a line of text runs and where pictures can break out. Section liveries, the small bands that carry names such as news, sport or business at the top of a page, tell a reader where they are without a table of contents. Many papers give each section a colour, a symbol or a slightly different headline weight, and readers learn these signals over months of daily use. Bylines, fact boxes, captions and page numbers follow the same rules on every page, and together they make a paper recognisable even when a single page is torn out and the title is missing.

The same system now has to work far from paper. On a phone, the full nameplate is often too wide to read, so many titles keep a shortened form: an initial, a monogram or a crest that can sit inside a square app icon or a browser tab at a few pixels across. Section colours carry over into navigation bars and labels, and the text typeface has to stay comfortable on a backlit screen as well as on newsprint. When a paper redesigns, it usually changes several of these parts at once, and a designer studying it can learn a great deal by asking which elements were kept: the grid, the house colour, the headline face or the small mark that stands in for the name.

A rotating sign, a run of commissions and a title that keeps its point.

The building has its own lettering. Swedish Wikipedia says DN-skylten, a moving sign at the top of DN-skrapan since 1964, was designed together with the building by Paul Hedqvist, and that the tower was inaugurated on 24 September 1964. The sign is built into the façade and appears twice, on the east and west sides, about 80 metres up. It is made of 14 storey-high letter blocks, around three metres tall, that turn on a vertical axis; their faces carry letters or black fields, so that the words “Dagens Nyheter” and “Expressen” form in turn. One full turn takes 25 seconds and shows both names.

The dates of the design story line up neatly. The opening issue appeared on 23 December 1864; the paper moved to Klara in 1901; the tower and its rotating sign arrived in 1964; the staff moved next door in 1996; DN Bodoni came with the redesign begun in 2000; the tabloid and DN Grotesk followed in 2002; García described FF Dagny as a FontFont release in 2009; and Letters from Sweden dates DN Serif and DN Sans to 2023. Swedish Wikipedia describes the title today as still written in capitals with Wall’s full stop.

For a design guide, Dagens Nyheter shows how a daily can commission type in stages, from a house Bodoni for headlines to a grotesque for a tabloid and then a full serif and sans family, while its title keeps a full stop chosen by its founder. Compare Helsingin Sanomat, a Helsinki daily that commissioned its own type for a tabloid switch, or Le Monde, a Paris daily. For this guide we use black, blue and grey with a Bodoni-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dagens Nyheter’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.