By David Montesino
Advertiser Managing Editor

There is more to a newspaper page than what you see.

A headline that shouts. A compelling photographic image. A wonderful story about a personality you've always wanted to read about. All of these are pieces to a complex puzzle that we call newspaper design.

How a newspaper page is put together is just as important as the stories and photographs that are on the page.

With the rare exception of the reader who doesn't mind reading column after column of dense type without the guidance of headlines and visual relief of photographs, most readers expect their newspaper to help them make sense of the day's news by guiding them through the mass of information.

This is where newspaper design comes in.

Where a story is placed on the page or the size of the headline a story gets or how much space a story takes up signals to the reader the story's relative importance. This is a process newspapers have always relied on to let readers know which are the top stories of the day.

As computer technology evolved, so has the process of newspaper design. Pagination, the ability to assemble all the elements of a page in one computer, has revolutionized the way newspapers are designed. Tasks that used to take two to three hours with pencil, paper and ruler can now be accomplished in minutes with software created specifically for newspaper design.

The speed and flexibility of the new technology has transformed newspaper designing into a more thoughtful and creative field. We now have journalists whose primary responsibility is to design pages. The Advertiser has 14 of these page designers.

It was not always this specialized.

The task of putting together newspaper pages used to be the domain of copy editors. But because these editors' primary responsibility was to read stories and write headlines and captions, the actual laying out of pages was often reduced to last-minute drills. It was a chaotic sequence of sketching pages and pasting up on boards the strips of printed type.

The idea that how a newspaper page looked affected how readers read the page was not widely accepted until the early 1980s. Editors believed that readers would find the stories they are most interested in. "Just throw that page together" was a common refrain.

Today, it is no longer enough to simply throw stories and photographs on a page. Page designers and editors now work together to assign value to stories and determine where and how a story is played on a page. It is often like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, except there is no predetermined shape. The result is as unpredictable as the news. The only consistent elements are the type style and the name of the newspaper, what we call the "flag" at the top of Page One.

Page designers now give careful consideration to where a reader's eye first goes on a page. Elements that attract readers to pick up a newspaper page, read a story or direct a reader to a related story are now regular features in newspapers. We call these "entry points." It can be a catchy headline for an interesting story or an informational graphic or even a billboard for a related package on our Web site.

The more points of entry a reader could use to dive into a newspaper page, the better.

The goal is to have a user-friendly newspaper that is interesting to the broadest audience.

For example, The Advertiser tries to have at least five stories on its front page. This gives readers a selection of the most important as well as the most interesting stories.

Designing pages has truly come a long way. Page designers have become a specialized breed of journalists characterized by their daily commitment to find the perfect balance between compelling storytelling and eye-pleasing aesthetics.