Salomon Gessner’s paper and a name that kept changing.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, usually shortened to NZZ, is a German-language daily published in Zurich by NZZ Mediengruppe. English Wikipedia says it first appeared as Zürcher Zeitung on 12 January 1780, edited by the Swiss painter and poet Salomon Gessner, and that it was renamed Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1821. German Wikipedia names the paper’s first four editors as Johann Kaspar Riesbeck, Johann Michael Armbruster, Peter Philipp Wolf and Franz Xaver Bronner.

The title in the header changed more often than the paper’s identity. German Wikipedia gives the sequence: Zürcher Zeitung from 12 January 1780, Züricher Zeitung from 1 January 1799, Zürcher Zeitung again from 1 January 1802, Zürcher-Zeitung with a hyphen from 1 February 1809, Neue Zürcher-Zeitung from 2 July 1821, and the current spelling, Neue Zürcher Zeitung without the hyphen, from 1 January 1898. From 1 January 1879 the paper also carried the added epithet “und schweizerisches Handelsblatt”.

The publishing company dates from the nineteenth century. German Wikipedia says a group of Zurich citizens founded an Aktiengesellschaft, a joint-stock company, in 1868, and that this company still publishes the NZZ today, now as NZZ Mediengruppe.

The rhythm of the paper changed with the decades. German Wikipedia says it appeared at first on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and on every day of the week, Sunday included, from 1843. It came out once a day until 6 December 1869, twice a day after that, and three times a day from 3 January 1894, with morning, midday and evening editions. It returned to two editions on 29 September 1969, and since 30 September 1974 it has appeared as a single daily edition. German Wikipedia adds that on 1 June 1878 the NZZ published daily weather forecasts, and that a foreign edition has existed since 1937.

From Fraktur to Antiqua, and a layout of four sections.

The type changed in the summer after the war. German Wikipedia says that with the morning edition of 1 August 1946 the NZZ switched its text from Fraktur, the German blackletter, to Antiqua, roman type; English Wikipedia also dates the end of its blackletter typeface to 1946. English Wikipedia says that, apart from that switch, the paper changed little from the 1930s, and that it added colour pictures only in 2005.

The page size has its own name. German Wikipedia says the NZZ appears in the usual Swiss newspaper format, which in Germany is sometimes called the “Format NZZ”, and that the paper took up the name itself for a weekly television documentary series called NZZ Format.

The modern layout came in stages. German Wikipedia says that after a layout revision in 2009 the NZZ was organised in three sections, and that on 21 August 2015 it appeared in a new layout developed together with the design studio Meiré und Meiré. Since then it has been organised again in four sections, with a fifth on Fridays that opens with a focus topic and carries research and technology, travel, mobility and digital pages, longer reports and portraits. The domestic news moved to the start of the second section, and sport moved to the end of the fourth, after the feuilleton.

The printing moved in the same year. German Wikipedia says the NZZ’s own printing works, NZZ Print in Schlieren, closed at the end of June 2015, and that the paper has since been printed at the Tamedia print centre in Zurich, with printing set to move to Tamedia’s centre in Bern by the end of 2026 at the latest. In June 2012 the online and print newsrooms were merged and the website relaunched under the name Neue Zürcher Zeitung rather than NZZ Online, according to the same article.

A long title, a short monogram and type for the screen.

A newspaper can change its typefaces without touching its name. English Wikipedia says the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong broadsheet founded in 1903, was given new fonts in a facelift on 26 March 2007, and that a redesign in 2011 set its headlines in Farnham and Amplitude, its body text in Utopia and its section headers in Freight. The title on the front page stayed the same through both changes.

The name itself can also change. English Wikipedia says The Straits Times, founded in Singapore on 15 July 1845 as The Straits Times and Singapore Journal of Commerce, was renamed The Shonan Times on 20 February 1942, and then appeared as The Syonan Times, the Syonan Sinbun from 8 December 1942 and the Syonan Shimbun from 8 December 1943, before the earlier title returned. When reading a newspaper’s identity, look at how long its title has stayed fixed, which typefaces set its headlines and text, and when those faces were last changed.

Three letters online, three words in print.

The website got its own type in 2017. Fonts In Use, in an entry dated 4 October 2017, describes a redesign of nzz.ch by the agency Edenspiekermann, published around September 2017, with new typefaces, new colours and new layouts. The entry says the foundry TypeMates’ Pensum Pro sets body copy and headlines on the site, while Pensum Display sets headlines and quotes in the digital NZZ Magazin. GT America, a grotesque from the Swiss foundry Grilli Type, handles decks, captions and navigation. The entry adds that Edenspiekermann treated the website as a starting point, with an app in development to carry the same design.

The three letters travel further than the paper. English Wikipedia says the NZZ launched a Sunday paper, NZZ am Sonntag, in 2002, with its own editorial staff. German Wikipedia lists other titles under the same initials, among them the magazine NZZ Folio, the history magazine NZZ Geschichte and the lifestyle magazine Z – Die Substanz des Stils. English Wikipedia says the house has published books since 1927, under the name NZZ Libro since 2006.

The archive is part of the brand too. English Wikipedia says the full run of the paper since 1780 was scanned from microfilm in 2005, its blackletter pages included, by a Fraunhofer institute, producing a searchable archive. German Wikipedia adds that in 2021 and 2022 the printed original issues from 1780 to 1996 were scanned again with improved text recognition and placed on the portal e-newspaperarchives. A chess column ran in the paper from 1893 until 2016, according to the same article.

For a design guide, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung shows how a title can change its spelling through the nineteenth century, drop the hyphen in 1898 and move from Fraktur to Antiqua in 1946, yet stay recognisable by its three words and three letters, and how a long-reading screen design can rest on one text family and one grotesque. Compare Die Zeit, a German-language weekly, or The Guardian, a British daily with its own commissioned type. For this guide we use stone, slate and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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