Byrne, who spent last week trying his hand at the new presses, acknowledged that color publication would require more skill—and time—on his part.

For each color page, Byrne must manually align the four colors on the newspaper and keep them in register throughout the press run.

Today’s issue of The Crimson features color on the front pages of the daily and sports sections, with the hope that color will expand to the second and last pages of the broadsheet sections in coming days and weeks.

“Amit, if he had his way, would go straight to four pages of color,” Byrne said, referring to the current Crimson president. “I’d end up putting him through the press.”

Fifteen Minutes, The Crimson’s weekly magazine, will begin publishing with a new color design in February.

From Magenta to Crimson

Editors at The Crimson—who often, like all journalists, refer to adding “color” to daily news stories—previously have never had the option of adding real color to their articles, whether in the form of cream shading behind news text or color photography adjacent to articles.

When The Crimson was born in 1873, known then as The Magenta in accordance with the College’s official color of the time, what would become the nation’s oldest continually published college newspaper was still a far cry from the operation at 14 Plympton St. today.

After moving from four to five columns in 1920, The Crimson used its own hot-type presses with hired typists setting increasingly arcane lead type.

Former Crimson President Osborne F. Ingram ’35 recalled sending his finished stories down a chute in the newsroom to the typists in the basement.

“When they were out of copy downstairs, they would bang on the chute,” Osborne said.

In recent decades, the chute has been replaced by building-wide servers which electronically transmit articles from reporters in the newsroom to designers in the basement.

Over its storied, 131-year history, The Crimson has undergone various design changes—from a scattered front-page layout throughout the 1960s to the more formulaic design of the 1990s.

The new look emerges from a semester’s worth of work, as editors critiqued design proposals submitted by the consulting firm.

Along with Paley, Design Chairs Ellen E. Ching ’04 and Christine C. Yokoyama ’04 headed up an executive committee that sought input from the entire staff.