News

Tech debuts new look

Today you see a transformed Tech.

For 129 years, The Tech has provided news and entertainment for MIT students, faculty, staff, alumni and family members. Our commitment to serving the community means we must stay relevant as the Institute and world changes. Today you see one of the results: We have updated our look to be more legible and reader-friendly, incorporating the best features of modern newspaper design. The changes we have made are countless, but I am excited to share with you these highlights:

Page layouts are more open. Stories get more space, with bigger photos and more sidebars.

On the front page, brand new boxes at the bottom will guide you to the most interesting stories in the issue.

To make thumbing through the paper easier, we have moved our section labels to the outside edges of the page. You will be able to flip directly to the section you want to read.

To make skimming easier, article tags above headlines will signal special types of articles: features, reporter’s notebooks, guest columns, and so on.

The typeface for text has changed from Times New Roman to Utopia, a recent highly-readable design by Robert Slimbach.

Headlines in Campus Life and Arts, photo captions, and entries in tables are now set in Univers, a sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger. Univers is used in situations where legibility is critical: on subway signs in San Francisco and Montreal; for graphics on CNN; on the keys of Apple laptops.

Today’s changes herald greater improvements. Over the next couple of weeks you will see new features in every section as we ramp up our in-depth reporting, add new columns by some of the best writers on campus, and introduce new ways for you to interact with us.

As always, if you have comments or would like to talk to an editor, please contact us at general@tech.mit.edu