A guardian of the past and the future

It’s been a big couple of weeks for the Guardian – Britain’s newspaper of choice for the progressively minded (or irritatingly ‘right on’ depending on which way you look at it.)

On January 6th, Peter Preston, Editor in Chief from 1975 to 1995, died. A true great of Fleet Street, whose hard work and application took him from inauspicious childhood surroundings in Britain’s rural hinterland to the top of a tremendously important British – perhaps even global – institution. All this he did half crippled by polio.

This is a bit of a personal reflection because – I must reveal my hand – I’ve read this paper most days of my life since the age of 16. So I guess in a way, Peter Preston has been one of the biggest influences in my life and outlook.

He was always ahead of the game, developing the paper from worthy and respectable to distinctive, contemporary and surprising; and in doing so, growing penetration and swelling the loyal readership. As the Evening Standard put it on a redesign in 1988: “He has transformed the Grauniad from a misprint-ridden in-house asexual organ of the Do-gooding Dungaree classes into the sassiest, most fashionable and strongest daily broadsheet on the Street.”

Which brings me to the next bit: this week sees another re-design to the Guardian– a change to tabloid format and a whole new styling. There’s a new logo and a new font for the body text.

Out goes the lower case logo, in which ‘the’ and ‘guardian’ are playfully joined up into one word. Out go the whimsical, rounded serifs and the jolly lower case g. In comes a capitalised The Guardian with harder edged serifs which seem to say, there’s no longer any irony here, there are things we’re minded to carve in stone today.