A Washington daily, a march and a family.

The Washington Post began in Washington, D.C., in 1877. English Wikipedia names its founder as Stilson Hutchins and records that the paper added a Sunday edition in 1880, so that it appeared every day of the week. Within months of its launch it had already absorbed a rival: in April 1878 the Post bought The Washington Union, a competing paper founded late in 1877, and from April 15, 1878 the combined title was printed from the Globe Building as The Washington Post and Union, according to the same account.

Hutchins sold the paper in 1889 to Frank Hatton, a former Postmaster General, and Beriah Wilkins, a former congressman from Ohio, Wikipedia says. To promote it, the new owners asked John Philip Sousa, then the leader of the United States Marine Band, to compose a march for the paper’s essay-contest awards ceremony. Sousa’s piece was titled “The Washington Post,” and Wikipedia, citing the paper’s own historical timeline, says it became the standard music for the two-step, a dance of the late nineteenth century. The march and the masthead share a name to this day.

The twentieth-century Post was shaped by one family. The financier Eugene Meyer bought the paper at a bankruptcy auction on June 1, 1933, Wikipedia says. In 1946 his son-in-law Philip Graham succeeded him as publisher, and in 1954 the rival Times-Herald was bought and merged into the Post. Meyer’s daughter Katharine Graham served as publisher from 1969 to 1979, and her son Donald E. Graham succeeded her as publisher in 1979. Through those decades the newspaper sat inside The Washington Post Company, which took itself public under Katharine Graham and in 1984 bought the education business Kaplan, Wikipedia records. The company’s main office stood for many years at 15th Street NW in downtown Washington.

The Post’s digital life began in the 1990s. Wikipedia says the washingtonpost.com domain was bought in 1995, an early online project called Digital Ink was launched and then shut down, and the paper’s website went live in June 1996.

Nash Holdings, a new address and a new line under the title.

The family era ended in 2013. On October 1, 2013, the Washington Business Journal reported that the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had completed his acquisition of the Washington Post’s publishing business that afternoon. The paper’s former parent kept its cable and broadcast television businesses and the Kaplan education company, the Journal reported, with Donald Graham remaining chief executive of a company that still needed a new name; English Wikipedia says it became Graham Holdings. At the newspaper itself, the Journal said, Katharine Weymouth remained publisher and Martin Baron remained executive editor.

Wikipedia places the Post under Nash Holdings, Bezos’s private investment company, and says Nash Holdings is operated separately from Amazon. Nash Holdings has owned the Post since 2013. Wikipedia also records that Bezos appointed Fred Ryan, a founder of Politico, as publisher and chief executive, and that in February 2026 the paper announced that the publisher Will Lewis would step down, with the chief financial officer Jeff D’Onofrio serving in the interim.

The newsroom moved soon after the sale. In 2015 the Post left the building it had owned on 15th Street for leased space a few blocks away at One Franklin Square on K Street, Wikipedia says; the old building had stayed with Graham Holdings when the paper was sold.

The slogan now carried with the title arrived in February 2017. On February 22, 2017, CBS News reported that the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was now on the website’s homepage, underneath the title. CBS connected the phrase to Bob Woodward, the Post journalist who had used it, and quoted the paper’s communications director, Shani George, as saying the paper expected to integrate the slogan across its other mediums in the weeks that followed. The same day, The Hill reported the new slogan on the homepage, noting that Woodward had used the motto periodically in the past. English Wikipedia describes the slogan as part of the masthead.

The Post has also turned its own publishing tools into a product. Wikipedia describes Arc XP as a department of the paper that supplies a publishing system and software to other news organisations, among them The Boston Globe, The Irish Times and The Globe and Mail.

Design and documentation.

A printed title carries its identity in a handful of recurring elements. The masthead or nameplate is the title set across the top of a cover or front page, often drawn as custom lettering rather than typed from a stock font, and it is usually protected as a trademark. Around it sit the dateline, issue details and, on a newspaper, the ears on either side of the nameplate.

Magazine covers tend to follow a cover grid: a fixed zone for the masthead, a main image, a lead line and a column of cover lines that tease the stories inside. Some titles let the image overlap the masthead, which only works when the lettering is familiar enough to be read when partly hidden.

Inside, a headline typeface and a text face are paired for contrast, and section furniture — folios, running heads, section labels, rules, bylines and pull quotes — repeats from page to page so readers can find their way. Digital editions reuse these pieces as logos, favicons, app icons and social avatars, so a publisher can keep a compact monogram or short form of the name beside the full nameplate.

Postoni, renamed Stilson.

The Post’s headline type has a documented history of its own. Font Bureau, the type foundry that produced it, says that since 1997 the paper’s headlines have been set in a sturdy, compact variation on Bodoni designed by Matthew Carter. For the paper’s 2009 redesign, Font Bureau says, the designers Richard Lipton, Jill Pichotta and Dyana Weissman expanded the family with more refined Display and Condensed styles for use at larger sizes. The fonts were originally called Postoni; they were later renamed Stilson, in honour of the paper’s founder, Stilson Hutchins, and Font Bureau now offers the family for newspaper, magazine and corporate use. English Wikipedia’s article on Carter records the same history, describing Stilson as a face originally proprietary to the Post under the Postoni name.

Bodoni itself is a family of high-contrast serif types descended from the work of the Italian printer Giambattista Bodoni in the late eighteenth century, as Wikipedia’s article on the style explains.

Read together, the brand’s documented elements run from a name dating from 1877, through a march written for the paper in 1889, to a headline face named after its founder and a slogan placed under the title in 2017. Ownership is just as clearly dated: Hutchins from 1877, Hatton and Wilkins from 1889, the Meyer and Graham families from 1933, and Nash Holdings from 2013.

For a design guide, The Washington Post shows how a newspaper can write its own history into its type: Stilson, a Bodoni variation by Matthew Carter, carries the founder’s name into every headline, while the 2017 slogan gives the masthead a line of its own. Compare it with The New York Times, another American daily with a long-lived masthead, and with The Guardian, whose identity is also built on a house serif, and with The Wall Street Journal. For this guide we use ink black, newsprint and a muted slate with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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