Newsdesigner.com | The Guardian Revealed

The Guardian Revealed

11:51 AM, September 9, 2005

The Guardian has up a relaunch page, in anticipation of Monday's switch to Berliner format, complete with PDFs of a four-page Berliner section and stories about the change.

In his piece, editor Alan Rusbridger wants you to know that it's not just the size that's changing.

There will be other noticeable changes. The new Guardian will be printed with colour on every page. Bold black sans serif headlines will have made way for a more restrained serif headline font. The titlepiece - a radical piece of eighties design genius with its then startling juxtaposition of italic Garamond and chunky Helvetica - will have been replaced by a more contemporary one using a new font designed especially for the Guardian.

It was startling, and also amazingly influential. That combination of bold sans-serif and elegant serif ital started showing up everywhere in the late '80s. Including whatever newspaper I happened to be working at at the time.

Rusbridger also notes that the body font, Guardian Egyptian Text, will be 8pt on 9.5.

There's also a story about the typography. It's built around a single family, Guardian Eyptian, with 96 members. It was designed by Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes.

For Mark Porter, the Guardian's creative director, a new typeface was needed to anchor the calmer, more modern appearance of the Berliner. It was time to replace the oft-imitated combination of Helvetica Bold headlines and News Miller body text.

Schwartz is American but has worked in Europe; his colleague Paul Barnes is British, but has worked in the States. Porter hoped they could unite the "quirky, sparky, aggressive-looking" elements of continental typefaces with the dignity of American fonts.

Barnes began working on a sans serif font, without the little strokes at the top and bottom of letters. His fascination with typography's history drew him back to 1815, when the first face with slab (blocky-looking) serifs was invented. The Egyptian typeface became wildly popular and led to a second major innovation, when someone chopped off its serifs to produce the first sans serif font.

"I thought, why not go back and make an Egyptian and cut off the serifs," explained Barnes. "Then it suddenly dawned on me and Mark: let's make it an Egyptian. It has the flavour of serif but with a bit more oomph ... It's somewhere in the middle between serif and sans serif." In other words, it squared the circle as Porter had hoped, uniting tradition and modernity. "It's clean, without being impersonal", said Schwartz.

In another piece, Porter admits his trepidation about revamping the paper:

"To redesign completely any newspaper of this stature is unbelievable and once in a lifetime," he said. "But [David] Hillman's design (the current version) is acknowledged as the most important piece of newspaper design in 30 years. To be doing what supplants that is quite scary."

He admitted he was trying to square a circle, producing a paper that was "modern but classic; authoritative but distinctive".

"If everyone else is shouting louder and louder, the only way you can be heard is by talking in a normal tone of voice - or even whispering," said Porter.

>Berliner preview edition [The Guardian]

Comments

Heads up: After you hit "post" things may be slow and you may get an error. Most likely, your comment did post. Apologies. I'm looking for a fix.

If you look at it closely, you'll see they haven't completely redesigned the layout; the whitespace usage is the same, as are the top-aligned headlines, etc. It wasn't broken, so they didn't fix it.

I'm still a bit wary about the typeface, though. I'll wait till I get my hands on Monday's paper, and see if it grows on me.

Posted by: MacDara at September 9, 2005 12:44 PM

Oh boy! It looks so… eighties! Yes, that's it! It really looks like the Marie Claire UK designed by Neville Brody, thirty years ago.

Posted by: rafaela pesci at September 9, 2005 7:20 PM

Styles seem to come back every twenty years.

Personally, I think that font's really hot, and I only wish they had done something to fix that whitespace. Although that is one of the hallmarks, I guess. It's a very strong new look.

Posted by: Nic at September 9, 2005 8:42 PM

I like what I've seen of the redesign. But there's one thing I'm turned off by: the new masthead with "the guardian" rendered in all lowercase. This strikes me as a gimmicky, dot-com era technique -- the kind of overly cute bastardization of regular English usage that usually drives newspaper folks insane (what copy desk, for example, hasn't had an argument over the proper capitalization of eBay or iPod at the beginning of a sentence?). Does this bother anyone else? Anyway, other than that, it looks swell. And color on every page? Fantastic.

Posted by: P. Anderson at September 9, 2005 10:00 PM

like Marie clare??? what planet are you on? it doesnt look anything like it!! and on the subject of brody have you seen the times2 design he has done for the london times? really really bad i'm afriad. its directionless, bland and badly executed. a real dissapointment. but this guardian redesign looks a bit shocking at first glance! but that intrigues me. such a brave move to ditch helvetica and the hilman design, but on first impressions (and really, you cant judge a paper from a tiny screen grab on a website) it looks a very confident, elegant, calm newspaper, quite unlike anything i've seen before. PLEASE LET IT BE GOOD!! Im a guardian reader mysef and dont want to be let down!!!
adrian

Posted by: Adrian at September 10, 2005 12:43 AM

The Guardian has failed. It has failed to better itself and has failed to recognise it was already years ahead despite being years old.
Why such a radical change? Well money, probably. Or maybe Porter and his creatives got a bit bored or something.
Don't get me wrong; it's not a bad design, but I've seen better, and I expected so much more from Porter. It looks like they picked some pretty fonts and got a student to have a go. It's lost its balls.
It was so distintive.
How many other newspapers can claim such an untouched and consistent design history? They only ever fine tuned it. And you want to know why they let it live such a long life? Because it worked, that's why. It was a brilliant design. Their only competitors in the UK were at The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph and that was only in the past few years.
They couldn't just change the size, could they? No. And they couldn't just tweak it a little bit. No. And they couldn't stop at a spring clean; a slight evolution, even. Heaven forbid.
Instead, do you know what they really did? They just killed off a design classic. And they should be ashamed of themselves. I bet SND will love it.

Posted by: Matthew at September 15, 2005 9:57 PM

This week, my newsagent was out of Independents - with the Irish Times or The Guardian as alternatives.

I've been avoiding The Guardian since it relaunched with a dire masthead in the ugly 'Berliner' format a few weeks ago. I used to buy it regularly, but haven't read it for weeks now. But ... faced with the Irish Times as an alternative ... what could I do?

Well, I bought it, and it's about as bad inside as it looked on the outside.

Posted by: Dan Thompson at October 11, 2005 1:16 PM

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