“About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition” — Jonathan Safran Froer, The Guardian
I still love how the Guardian used to look before their 2005 redesign, using Miller, very industrial, bold and tightly spaced Helvetica, and surprising amounts of white space for a newspaper.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 parody of pretentious font writing is still, perhaps appropriately, one of the few pieces of the way it used to look hanging around as a pdf. It’s still linked from an odd corner of the Guardian’s website that I’m not sure is supposed to still exist. The heading is the display optical. (This is an extract from the Saturday culture and review supplement.)
The Guardian’s banner used to be an attention-grabbing contrast of Garamond and Helvetica, created by David Hillman in 1988. The Garamond I’ve seen called ITC Garamond, and while close the 'T’ isn’t quite the same – custom redraw to match Helvetica’s x-height? There’s also small amounts of an agate font – it’s just called “Agate” in the pdf metadata – that’s some kind of News Gothic variant.
1 Comment on ““About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition” — Jonathan Safran Froer, The Guardian”
Golly I love that essay/fiction/piece/thing. Any author who can siphon humor out of straightfaced technical writing is a friend of mine.
However! I think JSF’s piece was actually first published in the Paris Review Nº 156. Or at least, a version of it showed up in TPR 2 years before the Guardian. Haven’t dug into each to find differences, nor do I know for sure if TPR was first. I could use some help though!