Deck

In a newsroom a deck is the line of type under the headline, and it has nothing to do with slides. British papers call it the standfirst, American copy desks often spell it dek to keep it out of the running text, and every one of those names points at the same object: two or three lines set between the headline and the first paragraph, larger and looser than body copy, whose job is to make a reader who has stopped for the headline keep going.

What makes it a deck rather than an ornament is that it carries information the headline does not. A headline can only hold one idea; the deck is where the second one goes, along with the stakes, the number, the name, or the reason this is running today. A line that says the headline again in different words has spent the reader’s attention on nothing, and that is the usual failure: decks that restate are the reason so many people read them as decoration and skip them. It is also what separates a deck from a subtitle, which is content to qualify a title rather than add to it.

An eyebrow is the other line in the same stack and the two are routinely confused. An eyebrow sits above the headline and categorises, naming the section, the series, or the kind of piece this is, in a word or two. A deck sits below the headline and expands, giving the reader more of the story in a full sentence. Both are headings in the loose sense and neither is one in the structural sense: the deck in particular is a paragraph, and marking it up as an h2 to get the size gives a screen reader a heading that introduces nothing.

Typographically it is the hinge of the whole stack. Set it clearly larger than body copy and clearly smaller than the headline, usually lighter in weight and at a wider measure, so it reads as a bridge rather than as a second headline. It is also the line that most often gets a line clamp in a card or an index, because the deck is written at full length for the article page and has to survive being cut to two lines in a feed. And where a drop cap is used, the deck is what stands between it and the headline: the cap starts the body, the deck ends the display type.