Edmund Arnold, who died Friday at 93, was a design guru who changed the look of the modern newspaper by introducing such now-standard elements as modular design and the six-column page.

By executing hundreds of newspaper redesigns and inspiring generations of students, Arnold helped make newspapers aesthetically pleasing objects and, not incidentally, made them easier to read. At least one improvement eluded him: “There must be some feasible news ink that won’t rub off and make newspaper reading a dirtier job than digging bituminous coal,” he growled in 2002 to the Quill, a publication of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Arnold’s design precepts concerned how to arrange typography and graphics on the newspaper page to enhance readability. When the editor of this or virtually any other modern newspaper puts the lead story at the upper right of the front page, he may not know it, but he is following one of Arnold’s “Ancient Axioms,” as he titled a 1978 book. Opinionated and pugnacious, he did not acquire his reputation as “the father of newspaper design” by being shy about his opinions. In a 2000 interview with the Society for News Design, he called the modern trend of shrinking newspaper widths “incredibly stupid.” (The New York Sun and Wall Street Journal recently adopted this format; the New York Times is soon to follow.)

Originally an expert on typefaces who edited Linotype News for many years, Arnold had firm opinions about that topic, too. “I don’t think any sane person would argue that roman is not the best body type,” he said.

Arnold liked to distinguish between readers and lookers — and he contended that much bad design was made by and for the latter category. He was in the wrong generation to fully participate in the “cold type” revolution brought on by computers, but he understood its pitfalls. “Pages are cheap to produce and typefaces are cheap to produce,” he said in the 2000 interview. “That’s why we’re getting all these God-awful abominations.”

Arnold worked his way up in the business as a classic newsman. When his high school in Depression-era Bay City, Mich., defunded the school paper, he and the staff sold advertising and made it selfsupporting. He went to work at the Frakenmuth (Mich.) News, where he became editor and then publisher, a job he kept until 1969, even while working for many other publications. He took time out to serve in World War II and covered the Battle of the Bulge for Stars and Stripes.

In 1954, he moved to New York to work for the Mergenthaler Linotype Co. as editor of Linotype News. The job sent him around the country to address groups of editors about typography and design.

In 1956, he published “Functional Newspaper Design,” which became the standard text on the subject until superseded by his “Modern Newspaper Design” in 1969. He was hired at Syracuse University in 1960 and became one of the few journalism professors in America to teach graphic design. Later, in 1975, he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University.

Arnold also helped redesign hundreds of newspapers in America and abroad, including Peru, Colombia, and Puerto Rico, despite not speaking Spanish. “He told me, ‘Mario, you do better with the newspapers you can’t read,'” a well-known newspaper designer who studied with Arnold and replaced him at Syracuse in 1975, Mario Garcia, said.

Arnold developed a concept he called “The Gutenberg Principle” to describe how a reader naturally approaches a page, and he insisted that designers create their pages to work the same way. “When I pick up a piece of printed paper, I go immediately to the top lefthand corner and when I get to the bottom right I’m done and I turn the page. That’s it!” he told the SND’s Design magazine.

In the 1960s, he determined that the standard old-style eight-column broadsheet newspaper layout created columns that were too narrow. He designed the six-column size to work with 9-point type across a column span that would accommodate exactly one and a half times the width of the complete lower-case alphabet, a measure Arnold contended was first advocated by Benjamin Franklin and the Italian engraver and typographer Giambattista Bodoni back in the 18th century. Arnold managed to make his case first to the National Observer, a high-end weekly, and by the mid-1970s, a six columns broadsheet was the industry standard.

Arnold first developed modular design, which used layout to draw attention to an individual story and used white space to emphasize it, for the Christian Science Monitor. Much imitated and adumbrated, it took newspapers by storm in the 1970s.

By then, Arnold had mostly retired from active redesign, but he kept his opinions flowing through speeches and books — 27 in all, including one on the 70th Infantry Division, which he had served with in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ten years after retiring, he moved to a retirement community in Roanoke, Va., in 1993. There he spent his time editing the retirement community’s newsletter, the Acorn, and designing custom birthday cards for fellow residents.

Edmund Clarence Arnold
Born June 25, 1913, in Bay City, Mich.; died February 2 at a Roanoke hospital; survived by his wife of 65 years, Viola, three children, and five grandchildren.