Smithsonian Magazine Table of Contents (1989 & 2013)

时间：2012-12-25 11:05:31| 新闻|浏览：134|来源：Fonts in Use|作者：Chris Purcell

This very active table of contents page shows the most recent redesign of the Smithsonian Institution's magazine. The original design, shown below, was created in 1969 by Bradbury Thompson (1911–1984), a native of Wichita, Kansas. The magazine used his design for at least 25 years. Thompson used Baskerville types exclusively: note that the body text in the original is set in Monotype Baskerville, but the masthead is in Fry's Baskerville, a more suitable titling face, which was also used for article heads.

Thompson was noted for his subtle use of white space. The third scan shows the magazine's famous "Thompson corner", a blank space that often occurred at the top left of a double-page spread. In an interview, Thompson explained that the white corner was there "to balance a gang of pictures on the facing page and add relief to a page that would otherwise be a gray mass. Also, it provides a more inviting entry to a new page." The white corner doesn't occur in the magazine anymore, though it's sort of there on the new contents page (but the masthead is kerned really badly).

Bradbury Thompson taught design for over 30 years at Yale. Another of his many famous designs is Westvaco Inspirations, a periodical published by the Westvaco Corporation, a paper manufacturer, to showcase its printing papers. His magnum opus is the Washburn College Bible of 1980, which he did for his alma mater. His design for the Bible features lines set flush left and ragged right, with line breaks occurring where a reader would naturally pause.