Diacritiques

… is all shiny and new and blue as of today. With a lowercasenospaces masthead. On the Editors’ Blog, several commenters call it “thegrauniad” already.

Seriously, I rather like it. The new (”Berliner”) format is the same as Le Monde’s, which I’ve always found the most pleasant newspaper to handle, with only a minimum of wrestling required. I also agree with the decision to leave some white space below the headlines. The typeface is a bit more problematic. Helvetica is gone, but I’m not sure about the new headline typeface (”Guardian Egyptian”): there’s a distinct gap in the uppercase and lowercase letter k, and the distance between individual letters looks a bit haphazard in some cases. It’s certainly very legible, though.

Oh, you want to look at it? The entire digital edition, normally a for-pay subscription, is freely accessible for two weeks or so, with downloadable pdf files.

I discovered the two-page, mostly graphical dossiers in the G2 newspaper-inside-the-newspaper. These could be very interesting for EFL teachers, to use from the intermediate level upwards. Today’s is about the arms trade.

Two addenda:

Guardian Unlimited (the online edition, not to be confused with the digital edition) is certainly doing a lot of auto-reporting today. A little gem from one of their articles:

In many important respects the paper you buy on Monday will be dramatically different. Most obviously, it will be, physically, both narrower and shorter - larger than a tabloid, smaller than a broadsheet. With apologies to JF Kennedy, “Sie ist ein Berliner”.

And I thought only ships, cars and countries were female (feminine?) in British English. (And shouldn’t that be “eine Berlinerin”?)

Second, I just got my hands on the real thing, albeit a copy from an earlier print run, with a Cricket photo on the front page instead of the Belfast riots one. It certainly looks nice inside: a clear, attractive layout. Even the headline typeface is much better on paper than on the screen.