Wietske Nutma — Obituary Type
Every day in almost every newspaper there is an obituary section. Everyday new names are placed in the same rectangle-like boxes. The design is always the same and there is little to no variation at all. Maybe it’s on purpose but looking at all those plain (mostly black and white) obituaries makes me feel kind of sad already. I started asking myself the question, why do all these different people use the same typefaces, the same size and the same blocks of text? While researching I found out that there is actually one website that controls it all, this means that all the different newspapers together with all those obituaries follow the same rules or restrictions. No wonder they all look the same!
HOW TO FIT IN
1 – PoemThink of a small poem, 2 or 3 rules max. and put it on top of the obituary. Write the poem in a serif italic typeface preferably Times New Roman, make it a bit smaller than your main tekst.
2 – NameMake the name big! But not too big, keep it between 15 pt. and 18 pt. Place the name beneath the poem, one or two rules apart. Make sure to always centre the name, if you don’t center it your obituary will look different from all the other ones, that is not what you want.
3 – DateIf you consider yourself family, write the place and date of birth beneath eachother and make it align to the left, then write the place and date of death date beneath eachother and make it align to the right. If you consider yourself friend, employer, or anything else besides family, write only the year of birth and the year of death with a small bar between it, (1958 – 2016, like this), centre it.
4 – Further informationIf you consider yourself family, write a long text about how much you loved the person and all his/her good qualities and then some further information about the bureal, church etc.If you consider yourself friend, employer, or anything else besides family, write a short text (you don’t want to go spend a lot of money on it, this is expensive enough already).If you want your obituary to look classical pick a serif typeface, most preferably Times New Roman in pt. size 10. You can also pick a sans serif typeface because you think it will look modern, but I’m warning you, it won’t, it will look tacky.Make sure you put some space between the nice text about the person and the bureal information. Always align it to the left.
