In online news, as in many forms of online and print media, the appearance of the content can influence the reader, perhaps even more than the content itself. Styling is chosen to make certain news sources look modern, traditional, or edgy, and these styling choices might affect readers’ judgments. At the same time, creating and hosting websites that anyone can access has never been easier than it is today, as seen in the explosion of fake news across social media outlets during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. On a daily basis, people shared misleading or false articles because those articles looked convincing and affirmed the biases of their readers. Certainly the content, timing, design, and layout of news articles might all contribute to their propagation across social media, but the relative import of each of these factors is still unknown. In this work, we are interested in how the appearance of news, independent of its content, influences consumers’ perceptions of an article’s veracity. Our research project examined how the presence of certain visual attributes (e.g., layout, links, fonts, and use and arrangement of photos and videos) in news articles affects people’s credibility judgments of unfamiliar news sources. We conducted an online experiment and semi-structured interviews to collect data from people currently attending universities. We showed them a series of content-neutral (i.e., “lorem ipsum”) news articles and asked them to rate the credibility of each one on a 1-7 Likert scale. We also provided opportunities for narrative responses for more in-depth opinions at the end of the study. Our results indicate that presentational aspects do indeed affect perceived veracity of online news sources. Designers can take these findings into account when seeking to communicate better with their users.