Comments on: New look Guardian

By: Typography | DESIGN MATTERS

Typography | DESIGN MATTERS — Tue, 10 May 2011 05:09:38 +0000

[...] an article I found on the 2005 redesign of the Guardian, one article reads “Up until yesterday The Guardian used a mix of three typefaces – Helvetica, Garamond [...]

By: rajaneesh

rajaneesh — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:56:41 +0000

The change is good, but I doubt whether it was inevitable. It would have been nice, had it remained the same and reinvented itself. Yet, it is a treat to watch. rajaneesh. india

By: Mark Boulton

Mark Boulton — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 00:30:09 +0000

Matthew - Strong words and, to a certain degree, I agree with you.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:12:22 +0000

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 distinctive.
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.

By: B87

B87 — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:30:45 +0000

Unfortunately, the international edition of the new Guardian is not in full color. Only the frontpage and the back side are colored, both G2 and the inside are b&w.

Although the re-design takes a bold step forward, I think the typography is too trendy. The Guardian Egyptian is on of those fonts you can see everywhere right now.

Not that I entirely dislike the G. Egyptian, but I’d appreciate to see it – especially concerning the masthead – interacting with a sans-serif.

By: Khoi Vinh

Khoi Vinh — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:24:55 +0000

I agree, there is a pretty noticeable Web design-influence here; I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I just wonder if when they’re planning to relaunch their Web site, and how faithfully it will translate this new look.

Anyway, the fact that they made PDFs of apparently every page in the debut issue for this redesign is tremendous, in my opinion. I spent a lot of time poring over them, and they’re gorgeous.

By: mearso

mearso — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 17:21:57 +0000

It struck me as heavily influenced by web design. The little navigation cues next to the numbers, the use of what I call ‘Dunstan Orange’ for some of the sub headings and the extra white space.

By: F

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 01:27:21 +0000

The first thing that struck me was the position of the barcode right at the very top centre of the front page. It looks very out of place and is a massive waste of space that could have otherwise been used for something else.

Other than that, my initial thoughts are that I quite like the design, although I have yet to get passed the first couple of pages.

By: Guy Carberry

Guy Carberry — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 23:42:14 +0000

City of sound has an interesting comment. Can’t post the link here for some reason but its on cityofsound dot com (today). The Flickr dissection of the front page on there is pretty neat too.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 23:36:36 +0000

Couldnt agree more, although their site is loved by most readers I know, I find it terrible and a good IA team would surely whip it into shape.

I not sure of the online launch date, it was mentioned in the most recent Design Week alongside a quick story about the new typeface and doesn’t promise much, according to a Guardian spokeswoman

“In the short term the design of the network of websites will not change significantly”

...A new gif in the top left and a few new banners then.

PS - can i edit previous posts? I amazingly managed two alternative spellings of Guardian in my first post

By: Mark Boulton

Mark Boulton — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 22:06:06 +0000

Guy - Yep, I have to agree with you there. Lack of whitespace is one of the problems with moving to a smaller format I guess.

Matt - No, I’m not sure Neville Brody is the right guy for redesiging such a text heavy web offering. After hearing him speak in March at a day long event in London, I felt he was a bit out of touch for designing for the web. Of course his grasp on graphic design is so strong that he’ll probably do an ok job although I can’t help think that Guardian Unlimited should really be designed by an AI strong team, rather than a creative one.

We’ll see next week I guess. When’s the launch date?