Hasta La Ideas

Richard Turley, art director of The Guardian’s G2 section, has just completed a redesign of Bloomberg Businessweek. Intriguingly, it includes some ideas that were originally intended for The Guardian’s redesign

The redesign comes following Bloomberg’s takeover of Business Week and the magazine’s renaming to reflect that fact. Turley relocated to New York to carry out the project, on which he worked with type designer Christian Schwartz, who also worked, with Paul Barnes, on The Guardian redesign in 2004 (Barnes also worked on CR’s recent redesign).

The original intention on The Guardian had been to use a recut of Helvetica as the main display face. Christian Schwartz and Berton Hasebe completed and expanded Max Miedinger’s Neue Haas Grotesk family (the original name for Helvetica), working from the original drawings to revive Miedinger’s italics and adding lighter weights. However, their work was eventually ditched in favour of The Guardian’s Egyptian typeface.

Turley has now used the Haas Grotesk revival throughout Bloomberg Businessweek.

His choice of serif face is another by-product of the Guardian redesign process – Publico. As Schwartz’s Commercial Type states on its website, “Although this family debuted in Mark Porter and Simon Esterson’s 2006 redesign of Portuguese daily Público, it originated in the design process that resulted in the Guardian collection.” As such, it was originally designed to work alongside the revived version of Helvetica then being planned for The Guardian.

Turley also brought in New York design studio Karlsson Wilker to create graphics for Businessweek. They worked alongside design director Cindy Hoffman.

The cover for the relaunch issue leads on the controversy at Goldman Sachs. Turley, however, had hoped to use a different design utilising this rather nice illustration from Al Murphy