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Notes on meeting with Roger Browning – The Guardian
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Pentagram completely redesigned the paper in 1988
A redesign was launched in April 1999
Sans bold for headlines although had a look at other fonts rather than Helvetica, but none were as
good
Use for all headlines except comment (Miller)
The body used to be Garamond but it was tired and didn’t work very well
There is redesign going on continually especially in the sections
The jobs section will be relaunched on 080100 with education relaunched in February
There has only been an inhouse design team for five years, with Pentagram responsible before
that
Marketing/advertising do their own layout from templates
The main broadsheet was 8 column until April and then the use of 6 columns was introduced for
news pages and there is also the use of bastard measures on different pages
White space is important to Roger and The Guardian uses a lot as he thinks it contributes to the
make up of interesting looking pages. Reading is a leisure thing so The Guardian try to make it
interesting. Roger thinks that the readers only read bits of the newspaper at a time rather than in
bulk so he makes it easy to read and the layout is constructed to make it easy to read in chunks.
The typeface used throughout the body text is Miller. It used to be Nimrod. Miller was designed
by Matthew Carter and is developed from the 19th century printer font. Carter tweaked Miller to
make it more economical for use by The Guardian and it is called ‘News Miller’. With the
introduction of Miller there was a 5% loss of text on the page compared with Nimrod.
Miller is also used for features, G2 and supplements. In G2 Miller is used at 8.9, 10pt. In the
broadsheet it is 8.75 – 9.25pt
After the redesign, the biggest complaint from readers was the moving of the two crosswords on
to one page. Roger was against them being moved together but was advised by the editor to do
it. After the complaints Roger was asked to separate them again.
Demographics of readership: 51% are women, 61% have one degree, 20-30% have two degrees,
the average age of readership is 35/36
Any redesign is done to attract younger readers but try not to hack off the older readers
In the redesign, the aim was to lighten the paper and not make it to heavy as readers read in
leisure time. Perhaps the redesign is more feminine, less aggressive and complex
The main source of income is from recruitment advertisements
The length of the paper depends on ads, if there is less news, they fill out the paper with ads
There is no real ratio for news against features as with The Guardian features have started
moving into news pages
The layout is described as vertical except for the features pages
When asked about ‘friction’, there is generally no friction as the pages are made up by editors
rather than designers
‘Hamp’: story across top of paper below teasers. This is used on occasion to make the front page
different. There is no rationale for when it is used
A strong colour palette was developed in the redesign and is now used
There is a tendency to use less and less infographics or at least make them simpler as they were
getting very complicated
All headlines are set left
News body is justified except for colourful soft news stories which are ragged (briefs, reviews and
comment also)
The comment page is a mix of 6, 8 columns and bastard measures
No drop caps in news stories since redesign (leader and comment have drop caps)
Sub editors layout the pages
News design editor responsible for news section and policing
The art dept is ultimately responsible for policing the paper
The Guardian uses Compositor software that works with Quark to define text boxes as body,
header etc
Contact Simon Waldman ([email protected]) regarding website