The Wall Street Journal's resistance to photographs is legendary. "I always thought that one word was worth a thousand pictures," retired executive editor Fred Taylor told a reporter on the occasion of the Journal's one-hundredth anniversary.

But in 1979, while the Journal was in the midst of a makeover, artist Kevin Sprouls devised a technique for illustrating the paper that did not disrupt its "gray and wordbound" appearance. The stipple, or dot-laying, technique produced pictures that resembled the engravings on stock certificates and currency. "I've always thought it was a pretty good match for the Journal," says Sprouls. "They're like fine engravings."

In addition to complementing the aesthetic of paper, the stipple technique offers a number of practical benefits. First, it enables the Journal to cull illustrations from a wide variety of sources, without regard for the quality of the photograph. Second, the illustrations can strictly limited to a small half-column format while at the same time they must remain legible. Finally, because the technique is carefully proscribed, the hand of the individual artist is hidden. A uniform style results, and, if necessary, one artist can complete the work of another. Today, the Journal employs four full-time and two part-time artists to create hedcuts.

A CNN story prepared by Charles Feldman in September 1984 includes an interview with Kevin Sprouls and also shows the Wall Street Journal's stipple artists in action.