The Guardian is one of the most famous and reputable British newspapers, which was established in 1821 by John Edward Taylor. Today The Guardian is mostly fo-cused on its online version — the media website, which was launched in 1999, and today has more than 50 million readers visiting it per month.
The visual identity of one of the world’s most reputable newspapers has always been based on lettering, which is pretty normal for editorials. Throughout the years, The Guardian has been using different typefaces for its insignia, but they all had more or less the same character and evoked similar feelings, except for the very first logo.
The initial name of the today-famous newspaper was The Manchester Guardian, so for the first 130 years of its existence, the editorial was using a logo with a gothic style typeface and thick lines. During all this period the visual identity of The Man-chester Guardian has never been changed.
The modern era started for the newspaper in 1959, and this is when the name was shortened to The Guardian and the logo was redesigned for the first time. The new logotype was written in the uppercase letters of a bold and elegant serif typeface, with thick black lines, softened angles, and massive traditional serifs. Executed in black, the logo looked good both on light yellow and white paper.
In 1988 the logo was redesigned again, and this time the newspaper decided to ex-periment with fonts and to create something unique and interesting. Not typical for the serious editorial, the paper started using a logotype, executed in two completely different typefaces. The first part of the wordmark was executed in a custom slightly italicized font with smooth lines and a delicate curve of the letter “H”. As for the “Guardian” part of the logo, it was set in the title case of an ExtraBold modern sans-serif font. The combination of light and elegant “The” and massive and solid “Guard-ian” made the newspaper’s visual identity truly memorably and unusual.
The logo was redesigned again in 2005, and this is when the new color palette was adopted. Now the inscription in the lowercase of a strong and bold serif typeface was executed in two shades of blue — a very light one for “The”, and an intense, yet calm for “Guardian”. The two parts of the lettering had no extra space between each other, but the different colors made it look balanced and logical.
The redesign of 2018 brought back the monochrome color palette and adopted a new typeface for The Guardian logo. Now the wordmark can be set both in one or two levels, where each part has its first letter capitalized. The new font is a bold custom serif, with smooth lines and playful diagonal serifs on their ends.