Harold Evans’s Pictures on a Page

Journalists explain complex issues to their readers, and information designers have a lot to learn from them. I was proud that Harold Evans, then editor of The Sunday Times, agreed to be on the editorial board of Information Design Journal when we launched in 1979.

He played a significant part in our smaller world of information design. As you would expect from a journalist, he was a prolific writer and his books on newspaper design and photojournalism were hugely helpful for the work we did on graphic formats at the Open University. Under his leadership, The Sunday Times was a pioneer of what we now call infographics, and his co-author of Pictures on a page,¹ Edwin Taylor, spoke at the first Information Design Conference.

As the obituary in his old paper The Times put it:

’Evans believed good newspaper design, rich in striking photographs and explanatory graphics, was essential to good storytelling and his interest in appearance extended to the choice of typeface in headings and text. This visual preoccupation led him to write the book series Editing and Design and, with the help of his inspirational head of design Edwin Taylor, Pictures on a Page, which elevated newspaper design to a fine art.’

For more recent work on news graphics, and newspaper design in general, see great books by John Berry² and Francesco Franchi.³ In the last few years we seem to have abandoned newspapers and moved online to the graphic desert that is online news.

1. Harold Evans (1978). Pictures on a Page: Photo-journalism, Graphics and Picture Editing. London: Heinemann.

2. Berry, J.D., 2004. Contemporary newspaper design. Mark Batty Publisher, New York.

3. Franchi, F., 2013. Design news: changing the world of editorial design and information
graphics. Gestalten, Berlin.