A newspaper’s masthead is many things – flag, signature, capstone, brand and a thread through history. When the Guardian of the Berliner format (12 September 2005 – 13 January 2018) was being refashioned into the Guardian tabloid of today, intense attention was given to the masthead.
Its award-winning typeface is bespoke, with the designers aiming to communicate “confidence and strength”. The editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, told me she wanted “a masthead with capital letters to signify a serious intent. I felt the lowercase T and G didn’t quite fit the mood of these serious times.”
Initial reader reaction was mixed: “At long last … the return of the capital T in The and the capital G in Guardian”; “the typeface and the two-line arrangement feel less authoritative, too much thick-thin contrast”; “the masthead is not yet sufficiently distinctive to stand out on the newsstand”. One devoted reader confessed that she had taken to rearranging the papers at her local Waitrose to ensure that the Guardian was properly displayed. The fondness expressed for the old masthead will make one of my predecessors smile. After the Berliner’s debut, Ian Mayes reported readers’ “anxieties” about the masthead had manifested “in the form of an accusation that the background colour – blue – made it appear that the Guardian was waving a banner for the Tory party.”
At first I too missed the lowercase, sans-serif white type on blue background, until it dawned that this flag combination, this visual branding, has been comprehensively appropriated by one of the great disruptors of our era, Facebook.
Taking the new masthead on its own terms, I have come to admire it, especially because of the way the front page has been evolving with it, in both design and colour.
To my eye, the two decks of type and the position chosen for the The above the letters of Guardian create an elegant slope to a sort of summit atop the h. It aspires, like all serious journalism should. The e curls to greet the ascender of the d below it. The prominent serifs connect the refreshed Guardian with long-serving mastheads from its almost 200-year past.
The significance of the connection was driven home at a recent exhibition in the Design Museum of London which told the story of the latest Guardian redesign. Among the old front pages, trial-and-error samplings and typographical details was a caption which quietly challenged anyone who thinks of media as linear: “… for the first time the look of the newspaper is being determined by its digital counterpart. Infographics, large images and a high-contrast typeface – features which are usually seen online – are now being used in the printed newspaper. These design decisions indicate that digital media is revolutionising the way that we consume information both on and off the screen.” Viner and the leader of the designers, Alex Breuer, pointed out to me that the two decks are necessary to make the whole page versatile. Placed together on the same level, the two words The Guardian can dominate the tabloid-size page and restrict layout options.
A fine example of the flexibility that the chosen masthead offers was the front page on 18 April. It launched the collaboration among several journalism organisations to continue the investigations by Maltese reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia, murdered last year. In white type on a mournful black background, the masthead was a band about two-thirds down page one. Above were a large portrait of Daphne, a headline in black on yellow, and the start of a special report which continued inside the paper. Under the band, at the foot of page one, was another disclosure in the Windrush scandal, and a pointer to more on page two about the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data harvesting. This combination of powerful design and powerful journalism is to be savoured.
Use of colour has increased visibility on newsstands since the period in January when the masthead was black on a white background, like most of the competition. Now, black masthead type on a light-blue background, in either a narrow or a deep band, regularly appears Mondays to Thursdays. White type on cherry red denotes Fridays. On Saturdays, when the paper has a lot of supplements to shout about, a deep band of magenta, or pink, or deep blue might form the background and the type will be white. An exception was 14 April, when the type was black on a yellow background.
I favour this search for a vocabulary of colour in print. It is a successful feature of the Guardian’s digital presences. But tastes differ, of course, and the colours have provoked criticism too – “garish” and “the Gawdy’un” are examples from readers.
The salmon-pinkish tint of the Journal pages – praised for their content and design – is a problem for readers with visual impairment. Ian Mayes received the same message in 2005 as I have lately: “Readers with degrees of colour-blindness or poor sight urged caution in the use of text laid on tints, to ensure that enough tonal contrast remained for the text to be clearly legible.”The demographic of the newspaper audience leans older, as it were, and the feedback to this redesign indicates clearly that the issue is a matter of practical importance to many loyal Guardian readers. I have asked the decision-makers to revisit it.
• Paul Chadwick is the Guardian’s readers’ editor
