John Walter’s printing house and the paper’s long family chapter.

The Times began under a longer and plainer name. English Wikipedia says John Walter founded the paper in London on 1 January 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, acting as its editor, and changed the title to The Times on 1 January 1788. The paper grew out of a printing business. Walter, the same article says, had bought the patent for logography, a typesetting system devised by Henry Johnson that used sorts for common words and groups of letters, and opened a printing house to produce books by that method. The newspaper was set from the same workshop.

For more than a century the title stayed with the Walter family. English Wikipedia lists the founder as owner until 1803, when he handed ownership and editorship to his son, also named John Walter, followed by John Walter III from 1847 and Arthur Fraser Walter from 1894. In 1908 the paper was bought by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, and in 1922 John Jacob Astor bought it from the Northcliffe estate, the same article says.

The front page looked very different for much of that time. English Wikipedia says that until 3 May 1966 the front page of The Times was given over to small advertisements, and that news moved onto it from that date. The same year, the article says, the Royal Arms, which had appeared in the masthead since the paper began, were dropped, and members of the Astor family sold the paper to the Canadian publisher Roy Thomson. His company brought it together with The Sunday Times in a company called Times Newspapers Limited.

The next owner arrived in 1981. English Wikipedia says The Times and The Sunday Times were bought from Thomson that year by News International, the company now called News UK, and that the Royal Arms returned to the masthead at about the same time, this time in the form used by the House of Hanover, which was on the throne when the paper was founded. Between March 1981 and May 1982, the article adds, the hot-metal Linotype process that had set the paper since the nineteenth century was replaced by computer input and photocomposition, and in 1986 the paper moved from Gray’s Inn Road to new offices at Wapping in east London.

Times New Roman in 1932, a compact page in 2004, Times Modern in 2006.

The typeface that carries the paper’s name came from a complaint about its printing. English Wikipedia says The Times commissioned Times New Roman in 1931, after Stanley Morison wrote an article criticising the paper as badly printed and typographically old-fashioned. The letters were drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the paper’s advertising department, under Morison’s supervision. Morison took an older face, Plantin, as a starting point and revised it for legibility and economy of space, and the new type made its debut in the issue of 3 October 1932. After a year, the article says, the design was released for commercial sale.

The type maker Monotype, which produced the face, tells the same story in its case study “Times Modern and the modern Times”. It says Morison, then typographic adviser to British Monotype, wrote to the paper in 1930 criticising its use of a variety of Caslon styles, and that on 3 October 1932 the old look gave way to a new banner and a new type family made by Monotype under his direction. Monotype adds that the face was the paper’s own for a short period before it was offered to other customers.

The text face then changed several times while keeping the same roots. English Wikipedia lists Times Europa, designed by Walter Tracy in 1972 as a sturdier face for faster presses and cheaper paper; a return to Times Roman on 30 August 1982; and Times Classic, drawn by Dave Farey and Richard Dawson and introduced in 2001. All of these, the article says, were variants of the 1932 design.

The page size changed next. English Wikipedia says News International began printing the paper in both broadsheet and tabloid sizes in November 2003, and that from 1 November 2004 it was printed only in the smaller format. The Guardian, in a report by Chris Tryhorn dated 8 October 2004, wrote that the printing plant at Wapping had been under increasing pressure since The Times started publishing in two formats, and that the company was planning to move its presses to a site at Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire.

A new headline face followed the new format. Eye magazine, in a blog post by Simon Esterson dated 20 January 2009, wrote that after the broadsheet pages turned tabloid, Neville Brody’s studio Research Studios was hired in 2006–07 to redesign the paper for its reduced format. Times Modern, a headline typeface drawn by Luke Prowse, was introduced with generous use of Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s Gotham, while Dave Farey’s Times Classic stayed as the text face. Esterson added that new weights of Times Modern, Ultra Light and Ultra Bold, were being supervised for the paper by Monotype with the type designer Patrick Giasson, and that the Saturday paper was due to appear with redesigned sections on 24 January 2009 under editor James Harding and design editor Jon Hill.

A nameplate, a text face and a paper that named its type.

A newspaper’s title can stay fixed while the pages beneath it change. English Wikipedia says the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, first published in Frankfurt on 1 November 1949, altered its traditional layout on 5 October 2007 to carry colour photographs on the front page and replaced blackletter type everywhere except the nameplate. German Wikipedia says the lettering of that title, designed by Regina May, has stayed typographically unchanged, and that in October 2011 the paper’s website gave up its own logo for the printed Fraktur head.

A change of page size works the same way. English Wikipedia says The Sydney Morning Herald, a Sydney title since 1831, moved its weekday paper from broadsheet to compact with effect from March 2013, following The Times in London, and printed its Saturday edition as a broadsheet for the last time on 22 February 2014. The name at the top, fixed since 1842, carried across to the smaller sheet. When reading a newspaper’s identity, look at which parts of the masthead have stayed unchanged, which parts of the page were redrawn, and the dates on which each change was made.

One short title, a family of faces and a fixed rhythm of editions.

The masthead itself has moved in small steps. English Wikipedia says the Royal Arms left the nameplate in 1966 and came back around 1981 in their Hanoverian form, and that on 26 July 2012, to coincide with the start of the London Olympics and a series of souvenir front covers, the paper added the words “of London” to its masthead. The title above the arms stays two words, as it has been since 1788.

Printing and colour changed with the presses. English Wikipedia says that in May 2008 printing moved from Wapping to new plants at Waltham Cross, Merseyside and Glasgow, which allowed the paper to carry full colour on every page. Monotype’s case study says Times Modern was later extended by its designers Robin Nicholas, Patrick Giasson and Alice Savoie, who added a wide range of display weights and the italic styles missing from the original set, and that the paper’s tablet app uses real fonts rather than images of pages so that the type stays sharp as the text reflows.

The idea of the edition also carried into the digital paper. The Guardian reported on 30 March 2016 that The Times and The Sunday Times were dropping rolling online news in favour of set editions, updated at 9am, midday and 5pm on weekdays, as they merged their websites and launched new apps. The report quoted the editor John Witherow: “The power of an edition has endured at the Times for more than 230 years.” The same report said News UK owns the two titles.

The pattern across these changes is steady. Each new text face, from Times Europa to Times Classic, kept to the 1932 design, and the headline face of 2006 carried the paper’s name in its own. The format shrank in 2004 and the colour arrived in 2008, but the paper kept its short title, its serif type and its habit of appearing as a finished edition.

For a design guide, The Times shows how a newspaper can turn a typeface into part of its name and keep returning to it, redrawing the letters for new presses and new page sizes without breaking the line from the original. Compare The Guardian, a London daily that also commissioned its own type, or Financial Times, a London daily known for its paper colour. For this guide we use grey, navy and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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