Peter Palazzo, Innovative Art Director, Dies

By: E&P Staff and wire services Peter Palazzo, the innovative newspaper art director, has died at the age of 78.

Among many other achievements, Palazzo redesigned The New York Herald Tribune in 1963 and helped start a field that he called journalistic design.

He broke with tradition when he combined newspaper layout principles and magazine display presentation, including larger images, increased white space, and elegant headline composition.

Palazzo used only one typeface, the classic Caslon, because "of the instant impression of integrity it gives to the news," he once wrote. The photographs were also noticeably larger.

In addition to remaking the hard-news sections, Palazzo helped start the typographically elegant Book World and the original New York magazine as regular Sunday supplements to the Tribune.

In the years that followed he started Peter Palazzo Associates. He was consultant for The Chicago Daily News, The Providence Journal, The Winnipeg Tribune, and The Edmonton Journal. He also created formats and covers for magazines. In 1994 he designed a family of typefaces called Palazzo for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.

He passed away on Jan. 30 in Glens Falls, N.Y., from cancer.