Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Culture is beige.

I'm not expecting to grow flowers in a desert
But I can live and breathe
And see the sun in wintertime
In a third country dreams stay with you
Like a lover's voice fires the mountainside
Stay alive

Not entirely sure about the white text on black background thing tbh.

https://s10.postimg.org/4i7ba7uhl/Guardian.png

I don't get why the single-G icon (on the app eg) is so different from the masthead G

so that it fits symmetrically into the circular twitter profile badge

but i'm not sure that's worth messing with the first letter of your new logo tbh

yikes - the black and white in the new app is stark

Stark and also very boring

Blacks should be slightly off-black or grey on the web - true black is kinda hard to read

I don't understand why designers don't understand that high contrasts are hard for people (especially older people) to read

everyone seems to be forgetting the blue was extremely shit

i like the new font!

This could work

https://i.imgur.com/AE17Yws.png

from this article btw

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jan/16/shelf-effacement-how-not-to-organise-your-bookshelves

Initial conclusions:

I like the tabloid a lot less than the Berliner. I was very fond of the Berliner and admired much of its design, each time I read the sports pages for instance. I mostly don't admire the new design. I also don't think the tabloid is easier to handle: on the contrary.

The website seems considerably worse to me, partly in how it handles but mainly how it looks.

While there were economic reasons to go tabloid, I don't think there were good aesthetic reasons to change the design. It seems an unforced error.

It all makes me think I will read the Guardian less in future, whether online or in print.

Mind you, it is now 17 years since I wondered whether the Guardian was worse than it used to be.

17!

I'm finding it annoying that some text on the homepage is the same purple colour used as the internet's standard colour for hyperlinks you have already clicked on.

It's the colour that throws me off in general w/ the new site. It's all every unbalanced and (relatively) restless to my eyes, compared with how it was.

I hate all the lines.

I don't understand why designers don't understand that high contrasts are hard for people (especially older people) to read

Some sites (iirc the 2012 Olmypics for example) have in the past offered 'high contrast' stylesheets (white text on black or near black, very strong colours e.g. cyan for links) to actually cater more for greater readability but it's never been easy to judge what works best for who and why here.

The garish star rating on images for reviewed media is bad too. Suggests the star rating isn't important enough to retain the space it had before yet more important than showing all of an image. The bigger problem remains pretty much everything getting three or four stars though so could've been a good opportunity to alter that system and save space. Should've gone with emoji imo.

I also hate the lines - I've had a couple discussions at work about the redesign (part of my job is website UX) and they are all variants on "wtf were they thinking with those lines".

The paper is fine, it's just a little sad and boring, kinda easy to mistake for the Times or Evening Standard. Two quid a day seems... untenable.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/18/elena-ferrante-to-become-guardian-weekends-new-columnist

This is an excellent move, seriously.

"Yet, when Hodgson allows himself a second to contemplate, he can acknowledge some would spy romance in last autumn’s return."

The Guardian's typical omission of the word "that" sometimes makes their sentences temporarily confusing for me.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jan/19/roy-hodgson-interview-crystal-palace-manager

Took me a while to find the guardian this morning - it was hiding with all the other tabloids, not on the broadsheet shelf where it normally is.

Thought the review section looked at but feeble when I picked it out but the smaller size is handy and the paper stock is better.

They've ditched the weekly film recommendations in the TV bit (I think, maybe they've just moved it). That used to be handy.

enjoyed Grace Dent dropping a casual Sylvie Krin-esque mention of her handbag worth the thick end of a grand into her food review today

brands as shorthand or juxtaposition is kind of her thing though, innit. like mentioning Findus Crispy Pancakes at the other end of the spectrum.

Where's Harangue The DJ gone?

new review and feast magazines are nice

fuck sake

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/27/stephen-bush-can-i-cook-like-andy-warhol

le sigh

I have bought it 3 times this week.

got a little echo of the opening of Lady Lazarus there

just think how many 10p mixups you could have bought for the cost of those grauniads

the numbers they use for the clues of the everyman crossword in the observer are worse than they used to be

PDF: https://crosswords-static.guim.co.uk/obs.everyman.20180211.pdf

the 4s and 7s especially

Gary Younge is the only reason to read the Graun:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/02/boris-johnson-white-privilege-black-woman

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/11/why-the-lefts-hellish-vision-is-so-ruinous

I mean

jfc

i wanted to pull a bunch of quotes and take the piss but really just fuck him and fuck the comfortable middle class bubble that formed his fucking technocrat "gradualism"

this mediocrity obv slept through the last the 2 UK elections, or just conveniently excised them from his memory. His students are very fucking lucky people.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/mar/08/how-to-retire-early-frugal-spending

the state of fucking this as well.

xxp

I posted an FT graph onto the rolling UK politics thread t'other say, that showed how under the centrist gradualism of New Labour, regional inequality was still off the charts in comparison to other major EU economies and the US. Whatever sticking plasters they applied to the problem at the time didn't do much good.

the tone of this "we must protect the poor thicko electorate from themselves"

the YouGov says only 6% admit to being lefty so everyone's a Centrist argument is weak as piss. When people vote as a self-interest group they often unwittingly become "lefties".

the art of damage limitation and carrying on when the reasoning behind your latest book is completely blown away by real events.

I'd love to see this cunt trying his patter with the postcode gangs of Sheffield, that used to rob tools out of our vans and try and sell them back to us later. Not that they were necessarily voting types of citizens.

We have a ready made Centrist party in the UK, no need to even contemplate forming a new one. Why doesn't he go and join them?

we have something like 12 by now

if you want your own accommodation in Manchester and you're a wheelchair user then the wait is a mere 114 years. gradualism at its best.

https://www.aspire.org.uk/blog/loneliness

I still think insipid soundbites are way more important than actual disability benefits for the disabled.

Still, it's better than it was in 1872.

It was terrible back then, poor communities didn't even have groups like More In Common dishing out platitudes soup.

"Neoliberalism is a long way from being the all-conquering hegemonic discourse the Corbynite left claims it to be. Indeed, neoliberalism has been pretty much disowned by the leaders of all the largest political parties."

Kindof shocked that a professor of politics in a fairly prestigious university does not have a better understanding of neoliberalism. That is, the way neoliberalims is always self-disavowing, presenting itself as a set of techniques and procedures rather than an ideological, world-making discourse. It is only the last ten years or so that the various crises set in motion by the crash have made it possible to name neoliberalism in a popular sense, prior to that discussion of neoliberalism was more limited to academic/activist/etc. kinds of discussion. Obviously the whole article is riddled with delusional hide-bound-by-class bunker thinking exacerbated by losing-my-edge anxiety but it should be pointed out that there is also a (seriously worrying for his students) cluelessness about the basic characteristics of the phenomena he is describing. This is different from his willful mischaracterisation of "corbynite" views and positions (which I would expect) and, to me, completely unforgivable from an academic point of view.

just felt that was worth noting. Also this kind of bollocks is intimately linked with REF culture and university managements increasing obsession with "impact," a disastrous vehicle for the most craven, showboating academics that rewards this kind of nonsense with professorships.