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Design patterns

What journalists call headings

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Apps like Word or Pages just name heading styles in a hierarchy: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3.

Journalists have a far richer vocabulary: kicker, screamer, teaser, standfirst, skyline, sidebar, crosshead, standalone, double-decker. These terms do more than describe where a heading fits in a hierarchy – they see headings as part of a conversation with readers.

In his classic The Simple Subs Book,¹ Leslie Sellers from the Daily Mail offers four guidelines for headline writers that I reckon information designers can learn from:

To tell the news
To use active verbs
To phrase line by line²
To avoid jargon.

1. Sellers L (1968) The simple subs book, Oxford: Pergamon Press

2. See Semantic line breaks

Cartoon by Roz Chast, New Yorker, 20 July 2020. Reproduced by permission.

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How this helps

Journalists have to attract and hold their readers. We can learn from their craft.

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Semantic line breaks

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