The Guardian teases redesign with trailer revealing new masthead

The Guardian has teased the results of its design overhaul – launching Monday 15 January on its print edition, website and app – with a trailer. The major change can be spotted instantly in the masthead, sporting a new typeface and a move away from its lowercase wordmark, a hotly debated logo that often divides opinion among designers and typographers.

The new wordmark is noticeably sharper, taller and with more extreme proportions, a change from its chunky, rounded former mark. It instead uses sentence case, with capitalised initials that more closely follow conventions of newspaper mastheads. Replacing the blue and white, lowercase design that’s been in use since 2005, the new black-on-white masthead also places the two title words on top of one another, rather than its previous masthead that stretched as one long logo across the top righthand side of the paper.

The trailer features a voiceover by actor Maxine Peake describing the key theme of the design as “space for ideas”, linking the reporting style and aesthetic concept. “What does the future look like if we view uncertainty as opportunity, and make space for the things that matter?” she asks, as a blank white page comes into view, then overlaid on a flurry of imagery. “Space for new voices, for responsibility, for whistleblowers, for interpretation, for the unheard. Space for hope. This is _The Guardian – a space for big ideas.”

On Twitter, the paper said its new look will “bring you hopeful ideas and fresh alternatives”. We will be covering the full redesign on Monday.