10 September, 2005

New-look Guardian unveiled

The Guardian's new front page was unveiled yesterday ahead of the newspaper's relaunch on Monday. The newspaper has been drastically changed in many respects.

Size
The Guardian adopted a Berliner format, which is larger than a tabloid but smaller than a broadsheet. I thought the paper was going with a tabloid size when I heard the news.

Does this choice reflect a dilemma of the Guardian - the paper had to adopt a smaller format sooner or later, having seen its dropping sales and rivals' successful shifts to a tabloid size, namely, Independent and Times, but did not follow exactly what they had done. That's why the Guardian goes with the Berliner size?

In the wake of the Independent's and Times's experiments in dual-format publishing we played with our own version of a tabloid paper, but found it hard to achieve what we wanted. To cite only one - rather basic - consideration, a tabloid Guardian would have been well over 250 pages on some days of the week, making it impossibly bulky.

Colour
Every page will be printed with colour. The paper says it will be "the UK's most colourful national paper".

Font
A story about font always attracts designers' interest.

» Logo
The only thing that make me feel sad is that the Guardian logo will be replaced. I love it. The article describes the logo as "the titlepiece - a radical piece of eighties design genius with its then startling juxtaposition of italic Garamond and chunky Helvetica". And the new logo will be "a more contemporary one using a new font designed especially for the Guardian."

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, said: "The new titlepiece is the final element of our redesign and completes the new modern look of the paper."

» Headline font
Bold black sans serif headlines will have made way for a more restrained serif headline font.

» Body font
It is designed by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz and appropriately named "Guardian Egyptian Text". The size will be 8pt on a leading of 9.5pt and has been designed to exploit the state-of-the-art press technology to be especially legible.

Over the years different generations of typographers have experimented with different fonts - from Century to Cheltenham, from Garamond to Perpetua, from Gould Old Style to Ludlow Black.

G2
G2 will be 36 pages, stapled and half the size of the main Berliner. It will turn to be the first stitched, full-colour news magazine produced to newspaper deadlines every Monday to Friday.

The Observer
In early 2006 its sister paper, the Observer, will also shift to the Berliner format. It says that the new Observer will reflect feedbacks on this new Guardian.

» Media Guardian | New-look Guardian unveiled
9 September 2005

» The Guardian | From Monday: a new, smaller Guardian, the UK's most colourful national paper