It's not the Guardian you'd hoped for, but a workable solution to living within its means and taking advantage of the commoditised market for newspaper printing.
And yet there's a feeling that the overnight transformation of an august London daily (once the Manchester Guardian) to 'tabloid' has significance out of all proportion to what has taken place.
Most of the discussion we've seen so far has been about its typefaces.
No surprise - the decision has been known for months - but in two steps, the former broadsheet has moved to a format whose name still evokes popular journalism and sensationalised TV.
If you haven't done so already, check out the new-look Guardian with its hand-drawn iteration of a widely-used headline style... despite the claim that 'Guardian Headline' was custom-designed for them by Tim Ripper and Paul Barnes of Commercial Type.
The much-admired website at www.theguardian.com has also been 'redressed' in the new tyfaces, but it's the masthead which seems to have caught international newspaper designer Mario Garcia off guard, and he questions whether the new branding is an attempt to force readers to see it in a new light.
Garcia prefers the older logo - with its "youthful blue, all lowercase logo" - and says it would have gone quite well with the smaller format. "I particularly liked the all lower case branding, which separated The Guardian from newspapers everywhere where publishers and editors believe that lower case would render their newspaper as less serious," he says.
"The Guardian has proved to be serious and authoritative even with its youthful blue, all lowercase logo. I especially liked the 'g'. Now it is a double decker logo with capitalised words, black, and surprisingly, not very contemporary. It will be interesting to see how readers react to the change."
Funny he should mention that; GXpress is also focussed with a lowercase and very traditional 'g'... and, in the days when I was the publisher of a provincial weekly which enjoyed the title of Times-Guardian - and that's more than four decades ago - I recall a masthead we developed that looked a lot like the new Guardian one. Nothing new in the world, perhaps.
This week's new look is the work of an inhouse design team led by executive creative director Alex Breuer and deputy creative director Chris Clarke. Apart from the typography, their creation has been lauded for the well thought-out structure which includes News, Journal and G2 sections. I'm not a fan of fat multisection tabloids, and hope they will have found a way to separate them, either by stitching or tabs.
That's less likely to happen as the paper exploits the opportunity to shut down its two printworks with the Berliner-format manroland presses specially-installed in 2005, and look for the best outsourcing offer to fit their schedule. Currently that's at Trinity Mirror.
But yes for what's worth, I like it, especially the news magazine look, and the stacked teasers on the front page. The tabloid spreads also favour features which might have had to share impact with others in the old Berliner product, and I'm looking forward to seeing more.
There was a tendency in comparisons - such as with rival The Times - to associate the Guardian's traditionally better design with that of Mark Porter for the Berliner switch, but the latter's move to tabloid just shows The Times up as an under-achiever. Perhaps it will be inspired to try harder, despite the inconsistent nods to the gravitas of its heritage.
Peter Coleman