Then, as juniors were campaigning for the presidency of the Crimson, many of them talked to Ramos about the possibility of a design overhaul, which seemed imminent.

"Everyone felt it was time," says Maggie S. Tucker '93, co-managing editor in 1992.

"We spent all this money and time working out the new computer system and we didn't see why we should be constrained by the old layout," Ramos says.

In order to rework the design for the first issue of the new executive board, the newly-elected executives browsed other newspapers, looking for features that they thought might work for The Crimson, Ramos says.

The idea behind the new design was just to make it more readable," Barnes says.

To that end, Ramos says he tried for "a modular look."

The executives selected new fonts called Utopia and Minion for the headlines and the text respectively, replacing the more traditional Times and Transitional fonts.

Greene, the graphics designer, also added and integrated computerized graphics as a fixture of the paper.

In addition, stories were put in large, rectangular boxes; bylines were moved flush left and sub-bylines were added; the banner was enlarged; more of a contrast was made between the headline and text fonts; and the number of front-page stories was decreased.

"We wanted to make the design look more international and less haphazard," Ramos says.

The executive board's first issue, published in January 1992, displayed all the changes.

From then on, there were small day-to-day changes, but they were subtle, Ramos says.

"It was possible to do glorious gimmicks [with the new equipment], but not night-to-night," he says. "We made the design so that someone can replicate it--it couldn't be too ornate or it would invite error."

Today

The design of the Crimson remained relatively unchanged until the summer of 1997.