Stumbling across City of Sound via plasticbag.org, my feelings oscillated between happiness and irritation. Happiness that someone was writing with intelligence, wit and clarity on subjects I was interested in; irritation that they did it so much better than me, on specific topics I was planning to write about.
In any case, don’t waste any time waiting around here; instead, go and read his posts assessing the new ‘Berliner’ Guardian and documenting the New London Architecture exhibition which I went to the other week, as promised. I particularly like that post, because it means I don’t have to write it up myself. Suffice to say that Dan Hill covers it extremely well indeed, with a lot of fascinating detail, and better yet, photos. My brother and I spent a lot of our time there just marvelling at their 1:1500 scale model of the centre of London, finding the places we knew, and knitting together our ground-level knowledge in a way that’s just not possible normally.
As far as the Guardian redesign goes, I’ll limit myself to three comments. Firstly, the new size is convenient, if less than iconic; it doesn’t feel as cramped as the new Times and Independent. I hate the over-friendly masthead—it hasn’t half the class of David Hillman’s Garmond and Helvetica classic, which admittedly has been one of the shaping influences, design-wise, in my life. The Guardian has always been my family’s paper of choice, and it’s shaped my view of what a newspaper should be: well-written, accurate, and wide-ranging, and unafraid to put forward a view on the great issues of the day. The new masthead waters down that forthright image. Mark Boulton has some comments that focus on the typography and the layout; I don’t have his expertise, but I did find the article on the new typeface, Guardian Egyptian, absolutely fascinating.
Lastly, the paper now has full colour on every page. I feel a bit mixed about this. On the one hand, it will give the newspaper a visual versatility previously missing. The art director will have more options, and I can imagine the sports pages benefiting a lot. That said, one thing worries me. When deciding on a photograph to go with an image, will they now have colour simply for colour’s sake, forsaking beautiful black and white? A newspaper is, historically, a black and white medium, but this isn’t just a matter of tradition. Black and white looks good. A well laid-out newspaper page, complimented by a stylish monochrome picture, is a wonderful thing.
Colour should be used sparingly because of the impact it can have, given the appropriate context. If every photograph is in colour, the impact is diminished. When most photographs in a newspaper are black and white, the colour pictures stand out; when they’re all in colour, even the text begins to feel crowded. The signal-to-noise ratio drops. Black and white photographs also seem more serious: this is, again, a question of tone, and to change a newspaper’s tone is something that must be handled with care. Mark Porter, the Guardian’s creative editor, said “If everyone else is shouting louder and louder, the only way you can be heard is by talking in a normal tone of voice - or even whispering.” But with a riot of colour on every page, the Guardian seems to be raising its voice.
