Commercial Type

When The Guardian went about its much-lauded redesign in 2004, one of the areas that art director Mark Porter wanted to develop was the newspaper's typography. Type would be used visually to support the paper's tone - measured, authoritative and modern. So, Porter turned to two of the best typographers of the current era, Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes. Until that point they had been independent agents who collaborated on projects whenever the need arose, but the following year the two joined forces as Commercial Type.

The Guardian redesign won a D&AD Black Pencil and is Schwartz and Barnes' best-known work here in the UK, but they've also created a range of typefaces that are used in some of the world's leading publications. They produced Austin for Harpers & Queen; Pblico, which was released commercially earlier this year, is the typeface of Lisbon's newspaper, Pblico; and Stag is an entire family that started as a collection of slab serifs created for the US edition of Esquire.

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