i am not a berliner

Not a big fan of the Guardian’s new look. See here if you’re not UK-based.

Doctorvee doesn’t think much of the white spaces between the headline and the story. They look to me like a knockoff of the Economist style, with the inherent suggestion that there’s something very important about to be said. So class, just settle down and pay attention. This works better in a magazine, where you can present the thing whole, rather than in the messier environment of a newspaper front page.

And the huge drop caps are just ridiculous.

I’ll miss the old mixed title fonts. Maybe the designers thought the old combination was all a bit Neville Brody, eighties style wacky juxtaposition, but I thought they made it timeless. The new title font’s too chunky, and the way the words run together makes the paper look like a trade journal – for the direct marketing industry, perhaps, or something for innovative paper and packaging executives.

 Also, I don’t like the feel of the new paper. And my arthritis is playing up. And the kids today…it’s just shocking, I tell you.

Comments

[chris]

And the bastards have dropped Doonesbury. How are we meant to find out what's going on in the US?

[Justin]

My initial reaction was that they've tried to put a website on paper. Even down to the trying-too-hard "hyperlinks" in the piece about CIA renderings.

And the new masthead is shite - a million amateur website designers must have swooned in affirmation.

Still, easier to read on the bog.

[Alex]

Trade paper...you're right.

It's just like a paper called the Financial Mail (not the Daily Mail city supplement) that refused me a job but spammed me with invitations to subscribe for months afterwards.

[jamie]

Got the second day's today, and it reminds me even more of something like 'World of Sump Oil'. The actual paper it's printed on doesn't help. I know it's meant to take heat set photography and printing but it feels like the kind of art paper that amateurs who want to start magazines invariably choose, when they don't choose something like 300 gsm glossy. They'll be perfect binding it next.

Surely the absence of Doonesbury has to be some kind of contractual snafu. Otherwise, it's all people will be talking about.

Hmmmm...

[Phil]

I had a weird experience last night.

My best friend at school was a guy called Jim (that was his nickname; we didn't do first names). Jim got me into Steeleye Span and Genesis and Be-bop Deluxe and Wishbone Ash, not to mention dope (although not acid). He grew his hair, I grew mine longer; he had his ear pierced, I had mine pierced, he had his other ear pierced and got a diamond stud [that's enough Adrian Mole - Ed].

Aaanyway, we were drifting apart by the time we left school, & when we did leave he went to Oxford & I went to Cambridge, and the next time I saw him he was trying to get into advertising and I was an unemployed Marxist poet (come to think of it, I am Adrian Mole...) and that was pretty much it.

Twenty years later, there he is. Bottom left.

Hi, Jim.

[Matthew]

I was in two minds about it, but sat reading today's (Wednesday) issue I was really impressed. It looks a bit like the New York Times' younger and more beautiful sister.

I can't believe they'll be able (or afford) to keep up the amount of newsprint. Each edition has had hundreds of pages.

One odd thing though, is that it is folded like a broadsheet, unlike a tabloid, which makes its footprint by far the smallest of any newspaper on the news stands.

[jamie]

Dammit, I just found out what else is wrong with it. The old format spread out made an excellent splashback area under the cat litter tray (our cat is about 20 years old and senile)and G2 used to fit snugly inside the tray itself. No longer. Fucking designers. They never think of marginal benefits.

Christ, at this rate I'll have to buy the sodding Telegraph: the paper that fits in your cat tray.