After my last post, I decided to do a little bit more research on the Guardian. As it turns out, the advertising campaign was part of the newspaper's massive rebranding initiative in 2005. During this time, the Guardian switched from a black and white broadsheet to a full-color Berliner print format. They created a new all lowercase logo to reflect their unbiased, center-left reporting. Finally, they commissioned a new type system form scratch from SchwartzCo Inc. The new family is a slab-serif design with a large x-height, low contrast and open aperture that includes: Guardian Egyptian, Guardian Sans, Guardian Text Egyptian, Guardian Text Sans, and Guardian Agate. Each font comes in numerous expressive weights, and are adopted to fit the unique needs of each newspaper section.
The chief designer behind all of this was Mark Porter. If you have an hour to kill, grab a beer and pop some popocorn because here's a link to a video in which he goes through the entire process! He's a very eloquent public speaker, and the Guardian has become one of the standards for newspaper designs, so I think it's worth watching. It touches upon many of the challenges with which news designers (print and web) will be contending in the near future.
Mark Porter Video
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