Frank Ariss was summoned by the Minneapolis Tribune in 1967 to freshen up the newspaper's traditional Gothic-style masthead. "Knock off the flicks," was how he put it.
But for Ariss, that wasn't nearly ambitious enough. He returned to newsroom executives with a modern, uncluttered design for the entire paper — transforming not only the gray and staid Tribune, but in the process changing forever the way that American newspapers look and function.
Ariss, of Pepin, Wis., a design artist and professor for more than 50 years whose work included corporate reports, greeting cards and even a British postage stamp, died Monday at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wis., following surgery for a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. He was 76.
"He dabbled in everything, from silversmithing to painting, but what he loved about design is that you were doing things that people would use and designing something that you could reproduce," said his wife, Mary Rolph, of Pepin.
Born in Birmingham, England, Ariss grew up in war-torn London, where he played in the rubble of bombed-out buildings. He received a doctoral degree in design from the Royal College of Art in London and joined the faculty at the Norwich College of Art in the United Kingdom.
He first came to the Twin Cities in 1966 as a visiting professor at what is now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Soon he began working on prototypes for the Tribune that so impressed news executives that he was hired to redesign the paper — something he had never done before.
Ariss developed a grid to lay out the paper so that elements aligned vertically and horizontally. Not only did it yield a cleaner look, it made it easier for papers to move later to computer pagination.
The Tribune's new look was unveiled in 1971. Gone were the old Roman and italic headlines, letters trimmed in serifs; in their place was lean Helvetica script. White space separated columns and paragraphs.
