After 102 years, The Daily Orange was lacking an identity. Eager editors and presentation directors had a tendency to re-work the paper’s logo every two to five years, said Jared Novack, editor in chief in 2005. So, in 2005, he set out to create the identity the paper was lacking.

When a reader picks up the paper, the first thing they see is a thin, slightly shadowed, uppercase-lettered ‘The Daily Orange.’ That identity – crafted by Novack and Mike Swartz, presentation director in 2005 – is heading into its sixth year of use, and continues to remain iconic on campus.

Tito Bottitta, editor in chief in 2003, had redesigned four years before, in 2001, while he served as presentation director. At that time, the paper was being produced half-digitally and half through pasting photos and text together. It was ‘nice and clean,’ Novack said, but there was not much else to it. Bottitta revamped the flag into a simple, Times New Roman logo.

But the generic Times New Roman wasn’t much of an identity at all, and Swartz and Novack knew the paper still needed something stronger to support its tradition. They had been playing around with a ‘big, gaudy gothic logo’ that Novack said looked ‘f**king ridiculous.’ Then, Novack remembered an old logo from the 1920s – back when the paper was known as The Syracuse Daily Orange – that was reprinted in fall 2003 as part of the paper’s centennial celebration.

‘It didn’t match anything in terms of a font, but when we printed it, we got a lot of nice comments,’ Novack said.

So the two set out to recreate that font to develop into a logo. Novack tried on his own, but said it didn’t look quite right. So he sought out some help from a professional.

He contacted Jim Parkinson, a famed font designer who is well known for designing and updating newspaper logos. Parkinson is the creator of Rolling Stone’s logo and crafted updates of logos for the Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Novack knew it was a shot in the dark, but he took a chance.

‘I said a prayer and dropped him an e-mail,’ he said. ‘I just asked for him to please help and take us on as charity. In a week, he retraced it and added a shadow effect to it. It really finally gave The Daily Orange a permanent logo. I’m pretty sure we sent him a thank you card and a Syracuse sweater.’

And thus, the current identity of The Daily Orange was born.

When students returned to campus in fall 2005, they were greeted with a more compact and convenient Daily Orange in newsstands. Novack and Swartz engineered a redesign during the summer to complement the new logo and allow for consistent integration of color into The D.O. for the first time.

With their redesign, The D.O. moved away from the traditional ‘New York Times’ broadsheet format, Novack said, towards a more magazine-like feel, often seen in British newspapers.

Bottitta and Novack both crafted redesigns with the reader – an SU student – and content in mind. The most important thing to his redesign was finding out the goals of the editors, and giving them the format to complement those goals, Bottitta said. Novack noted the importance of giving readers what they wanted – in his case, color for photos and advertisers.

For Novack, the flag remains one of his favorite parts of the paper. It is a mark of smart design – both in the technical sense and for the readership. And after six years, the logo still remains at the top of the page, unchanged.

Said Novack: ‘This is a part that can really endure.’

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Published on February 20, 2011 at 12:00 pm