Newsdesigner.com | SIE SIND EIN BERLINER

SIE SIND EIN BERLINER

5:04 PM, July 3, 2004

It's been a busy year for newspaper designers in the British Isles. First, The Independent started a tabloid edition. Then the Irish Independent did it. Then The Times followed suit. Then the Indy dumped its broadsheet edition entirely. And now, as Peter Cole writes in The Independent, details are emerging about The Guardian's plans to downsize in 2006. It's not tabloid size The Grauniad's shooting for, however, but "Berliner" size, sort of a broadsheet/tabloid hybrid like Le Monde.

The Guardian is very enthusiastic about this size, believing it to be less constricting than the pure tabloid, where there is always the temptation to go for a single picture and dominant story on each page. The Guardian's designers believe the Berliner format will give them a distinctive product, with cooler typography than a tabloid and a serious feel. It will also get round the dominance of the conventional advertisement sizes in the tabloid format.

New or reconfigured presses will be required, to serve both the north and south of the country. The Observer, owned by The Guardian, would change format at the same time. There would be no going back for either paper, no interim period of producing the old broadsheet alongside the new Berliner. It will be the first use in Britain of this size of paper, and The Observer could be the first quality Sunday paper to downsize. High risks. High stakes. But there is no doubt at The Guardian that this is what it must do. All the research says its readers find a smaller format more convenient.

>The 'Berliner' may not be too little, but is it too late? [The Independent]

Comments

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Does anyone have centimetre/inches dimensions for the "Berliner"?

Posted by: Lee at July 3, 2004 6:11 PM

Good question! I pretty much lost my high school Deutsch vielen Jahren ago, but I found this handy German Wikipedia page that says 315 x 470 mm (that's 12.4 x 18.5 inches for my American buddies). The PDF of Le Monde I downloaded today is that size.

Posted by: newsdesigner at July 3, 2004 6:55 PM

This would not be the first use of the size in the UK. It's very common in Northern Ireland. The Irish News (a regional) and the Portadown Times and Newtownabbey Times (local) both use it.

Politics aside, and I'm no Unionist, the Irish Times is published in the UK.

Jason...

Posted by: Jason Walsh at July 8, 2004 10:17 AM

Where dose the term 'berliner' come from?

Posted by: John at October 1, 2004 7:52 AM

from the type of press it is

Posted by: tim at August 10, 2005 7:26 AM

I was wondering how I can find out which UK national papers use InDesign and which ones use Quark? In particular I was curious which one the Guardian favours.

Posted by: Emma at August 30, 2005 9:18 AM

Guardian uses Quark

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