Pretty in Pink: 9 Ways to Use Salmon Newsprint

Salmon newsprint isn’t just for sports and business papers. Traditionally, those publications have used it to stand out in the newsstand, but it’s a warm, winning colour no matter where you find it. Plus, we hear pink is having a moment. Here are 9 newspapers – from posters to menus to type specimens – that show off the possibilities of salmon (though Pantone says it's really more of a "bisque".)

Fresh Eyes Cuba

Salmon newsprint feels retro when paired with a photo of one of Havana’s classic cars in this broadsheet. It's part of the Fresh Eyes Cuba project, a collaboration between the Designmatters department at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design and the Instituto de Diseño (ISDi), Cuba’s only design school.

(Design by Tracey Shiffman of Shiffman and Kohnke.)

Public Theater

Don’t be afraid to pare down your palette – simple colours can look striking on tinted pages. Case in point: this mini for the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, which stays true to the organization’s branding with a one-colour design.

Macellaio’s Post

Macellaio is an Italian restaurant with locations around London. They’ve been printing their menu on newsprint since 2014 and switched things up with salmon in May. The red touches in their branding really pop against the pink (and it makes a flattering Instagram backdrop, too.)

National Theatre Wales – Lifted by Beauty

This spring, the National Theatre Wales led audiences through Rhyl, a seaside town in North Wales, for an outdoor performance of Mark Storor’s "Lifted by Beauty: Adventures in Dreaming”. The newsprint programme, a traditional mini, was “a blessing for location-specific theatre – easily snuck under the umbrella or dashed into a coat pocket."

Working with coloured pages "opened up a new spectrum of colour combinations, added adventure and experimentation to the design process,” says BWTIC, the creative studio behind the programme. "Deep, bold blues add impact, contrasting the warm tones of the salmon paper stock. More complimentary oranges bring subtlety, with just a little punch."

New York Times Magazine type specimen

In the introduction to this type specimen, printed for a retrospective exhibition at The Type Director’s Club, design director Gail Bichler writers: "The design of The New York Times Magazine doesn’t use of a lot of ornamentation or flourishes."

Similarly, the NYT Mag team approached the 40-page specimen with restraint: "We kept it classic and printed the whole thing in black," Bichler says. "But opted for the salmon newsprint to give it a pop of color."

Les Siestes

Pro tip: sticking to a single CMYK colour is a win-win. There’s no chance of misregistration (that’s when inked plates don’t overlap precisely) and it’s easier to predict how colours will look in print.

Plus, in our experience, single-color designs look amazing. See the above examples from the Public Theater, The New York Times Magazine and this programme for Les Siestes, an electronic music festival, which is printed in 100% cyan.

Fictional Journal

Fictional Journal is publication of design theory and practice. Issue 2, printed as a traditional broadsheet, questions the role of design in propaganda, and adopts a medium that is at once a powerful vehicle for, and defense against, propaganda.

Slush (from Benedict Drew's "The Trickle-Down Syndrome")

Artist Benedict Drew filled a room at London's Whitechapel Gallery with 20,000 salmon tabloids for "The Trickle-Down Syndrome". The choice of salmon newsprint, long associated with finance publications, is perhaps a nod to the exhibition title, which references an economic term used to describe the belief that "benefits for the wealthy will eventually trickle down to the rest of society."

Uber Boxer

This knockout programme is for Theater Tuchlaube Aarau in Aarau, Switzerland. Designed by Zeitgeist, it's meant to evoke "the mood of a real boxing event decades ago."

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It's tricky to capture the colour of salmon newsprint with a photo. To see it for yourself, request a free sample.