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.