The new Guardian: Lieben Sie das Berliner?
They've redesigned the Guardian.
Yep, it's a lot smaller for a start. But not quite as small as a standard tabloid. They'd done some experiments with tabloids but found the paper would have been far too bulky - over 250 pages on some days.
So they plumped for the "Berliner" or "Berlin" or "midi" size - the same handsome format used in La Repubblica in Rome and La Vanguardia in Barcelona and Le Monde in Paris - and the French financial paper Les Echos, which switched to it two years ago. So, very Continental so far.
It's still fat - very fat in fact this morning - but handy, large yet manageable. (Let's face it, broadsheets ARE a very unwieldy design - the only reason why we had broadsheets in the first place was because the convention grew out of some daft newspaper tax based on the number of pages or something)
A size change isn't just about flicking a switch and telling readers their old paper is now "smaller" (or "more compact" or whatever the marketroids call it). It has many, many ramifications for a complex ecosystem such as a newspaper.
For a start, they had to build special new machines to handle the new format - three of them, pumping out 90,000 copies an hour. Then there were all those tons of steel and concrete to reinforce the floors in the print plants in Manchester and London to hold the new presses.
Between the first dummy runs and the last retraining, the ramifications would have to go right down the line, down to the tiniest little details - everything from changing the rate cards and ad sales systems, and all that retail display stuff, to new advertising grids and electronic templates for news pages. Story counts in the new-look paper will obviously be very different to both a broadsheet and the new "compacts". And now there are five wider columns of text per page instead of the old eight.
And the sports section is now a separate supplement every day of the week, 36 pages. They said it was going to be stapled, but not in our Irish edition this morning.
They also boasted full colour on this morning's front page but the black and white starts on page five in the Irish edition. Maybe they didn't want to risk it, or maybe that's just the overseas editions. Eight hundred years of staple guns, eh?
Then I checked out the PDFs of the new digital edition online at http://digital.guardian.co.uk (it's free until September 26). And the black and white pages in the Irish edition are, indeed, in colour. So that wow factor of full colour is totally lost on us Irish readers. Pity.
The quality of the photographic reproduction has gone up several notches, but they're spoiled in this morning's edition (at least the one I bought) by over-inking.
The type
But the other most dramatic change is the typefaces. Gone is the classic, groundbreaking design from the late 1980s, with its stylish juxtaposition of heavy Helvetica and italic Garamond, and the News Miller body text.
The headlines are definitely much lighter, smaller, not so "loud", though they've kept that distinctive extra white space between the heads and the body type. The heads are neither serif (pay attention at the back - that's the letters with the squiggly stroke things at the top and bottom) nor sans serif (without the strokes). They're something in between, a modern twist on a very 19th-century breed of typeface called Egyptian, or slab serifs.
It's a clever choice. Egyptian is perched somewhere between the classic, "ancient" world of serif, and the modern sans era. Very popular on "FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR KITE" circus posters and what have you at the time. But the Guardian's versions are surprisingly smooth at normal headline size, with the serifs fairly whittled back.
At the more microscopic level of body type, the serifs are boosted up slightly again. Then everything goes very blocky - and can afford to - for the section headings. The masthead is blocky too - "the guardian", now all lower case (very ee cummings and "this life" - but they cop out with the folios, where it's "The Guardian", upper and lower case).
The new headline font is called Guardian Egyptian Display Regular, and the body type is Guardian Egyptian Text - 8pt set on 9.5pt leading. How many newspapers bar this lot or the London Times do you know who'd take the time, trouble and money to design an entire range of typefaces for its headlines, body copy etc?
Overall, the makeover is simple and stylish like the previous design, but not as big, bold or loud. They've even got rid of their drop caps on most articles - apart from a "fifth column" on the front page and some articles in the Media supplement and a piece on page 11 (what's the rule on this one, guys?). Perhaps they wanted to be more than a compact, but without having the volume knob turned up as loud as a typical (redtop) tabloid.
But there's a sort of deja-vu moment when it comes to the G2 supplement. Formerly a tabloid, it's now a half-Berliner. Those light headline fonts from the main paper are mixed with the much heavier, blockier variant, and G2 has big block caps (as deep as eight lines of text). It's sort of reminiscent of the "comic" size version of the paper's "The Editor" supplement they used to do on Saturdays, which was just such a brilliant idea.
A really trainspottery footnote on sizes
Stop fiddling at the back of the class. The print area of a Berliner page is about 29cm. That's some 2cm wider than a standard tabloid such as the Mirror (or the Lucan Gazette for that matter). But the biggest gain compared with a titchy old tabloid is in height - a print area of about 44cm. That's a good 10cm (nearly four inches) taller than a tabloid.
The overall size of a page in the new-look Guardian (including the white space or "gutters") is 470mm x 315mm - a standard tabloid is about 370mm (to 375mm) x 290mm (to 298mm or so).
When I say "standard tabloid", it's because papers grouped together as tabloids can very widely in size. The Daily Ireland, for example, is slightly deeper than that standard tabloid size (400mm), and the Athlone Voice is stranger again - 315mm wide like the new Guardian, but 400mm deep like the Daily Ireland.
Posted by mick cunningham at September 12, 2005 03:50 PM | Email a friend this entry
Great summary, Mick - cheers. It's especially useful for those of us in the colonies who won't get a chance to see a copy in the flesh until Christmas.
I'd like someone to design a whole family of typefaces for my personal use.
Posted by: david at September 12, 2005 09:04 PM