#2,761

Today's re-launch of The Guardian in tabloid format reminds me that it was the newspaper's design that prompted me to buy it for the very first time. I was on holiday, naked and unashamed and far removed from my working environment in Berlin, at the Cap d'Agde naturist resort complex. At the tabac, the masthead of the broadsheet caught my eye, modern and bold and very different from those of most competing publications of the time. And The Guardian had run colour photographs on the front page since the beginning of the year 1995.

I quickly realised that the newspaper's journalism fitted my 'world view' and becoming a regular reader was an inevitability. My copy was always waiting for me at the kiosk in Cologne in the late nineties, then at the stand in the lobby of the Novotel in Abu Dhabi. By that time I could also access the online edition, but it was only when I returned to Germany that the digital version became my regular source of news and comment. 

Shall I be a buyer of the new tabloid? Probably not, given that I've become so used to inhabiting cyberspace in preference to the real world outside in Munich. But the re-design is, in my opinion, brilliant and will quite possibly attract new readers.