Peter Palazzo Dies at 78; Art Director for Newspapers
NY Times
Peter Palazzo, an editorial art director who redesigned The New York Herald Tribune in 1963 and helped start a genre that he called journalistic design, died on Jan. 30 in Glens Falls, N.Y. He would have been 79 on Feb. 2.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Danielle.
In 1963, when Mr. Palazzo was hired to reformat the foundering Sunday edition of The Tribune, most newspapers were rigidly, and often blandly, composed by editors who were not trained as designers or art directors. Originally an advertising designer, Mr. Palazzo was asked to create a typographic format that would distinguish The Tribune from its competitors. He broke with tradition when he combined newspaper layout principals and magazine display presentation, including larger images, increased white space, and elegant headline composition.
It was a calculated risk.
“One must be very careful about tampering” with the readers’ habits, “which have built up over a long period of time,” he wrote in 1964 in Print magazine. But since The Tribune had been steadily losing Sunday circulation to The New York Times, Jim Bellows, editor of The Tribune, took a chance that Mr. Palazzo’s concept to design all the Sunday sections for “individual identification and unified appearance” would transform the archaic-looking pages into something modern that would attract new readers.
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