On February 12, 1988, the Guardian reached readers with a new masthead, new typefaces, two sections, and photographs given room to breathe. Michael George McNay, the design editor who directed that overhaul, died on July 25, 2026, aged 91.

The transformation was both visible and structural. McNay brought graphic designer David Hillman into the project, learned the paper's Atex production system, trained subeditors, and guarded the new layout rules from page to page. The Guardian News & Media archive preserves his brief to Hillman, dated July 12, 1987, with its compact demand: "We want to look modern, newsy, busy..." The result replaced crowded front pages with one or two principal stories, enlarged the role of photography, and changed even the newspaper's title treatment.

The redesign registered beyond the Guardian's own offices. Reporting on the new edition the following day, El País described a paper using clearer visual distinctions between news and analysis, with pictures no longer buried in text. McNay's former colleague Ian Mayes later said the combination of bold Helvetica and italic Garamond was copied inside and outside the newspaper industry. Its influence came from a partnership: editor Peter Preston backed the investment, Hillman supplied the graphic design, and McNay turned the plan into a daily editorial practice.

McNay was born in Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan, on March 7, 1935. The youngest of three boys, he was 12 when his family moved to Britain after partition in 1947. He attended Darlington Grammar School in County Durham, served in the Royal Corps of Signals, and spent a year reading English at Balliol College, Oxford. Trainee reporting jobs at the Oxford Mail and Bedford Times led him to the Guardian's Manchester office, where he began as a subeditor in 1963.

Production work became his route into authorship. He moved into features, became arts editor, and wrote criticism of art and film as well as obituaries of artists. His paper was a place where words, pictures, and typography had to work together. In his introduction to the Guardian style guide, he wrote, "The Guardian has always been a newspaper for writers, and so a newspaper for readers." He argued that editing and design existed to make writing more accessible without flattening an individual writer's voice.

That belief also shaped editorial choices. Former Guardian editor Peter Preston recalled that he and McNay brought cartoonist Steve Bell to the paper in the early 1980s because they wanted a British daily strip alongside Doonesbury. McNay's own archive stretches across art criticism, film writing, features, and scores of obituaries. His 1999 assessment of painter Patrick Heron became the starting point for a 2002 book in Tate's St Ives series.

Retirement did not end his engagement with art and place. He helped establish the Hazlitt Society in 2003 after the restoration of William Hazlitt's grave in Soho. For Eamonn McCabe's 2008 book Artists and their Studios, McNay wrote the text accompanying portraits of 33 artists, a collaboration documented by the National Portrait Gallery. Hidden Treasures of England followed in 2009, and Hidden Treasures of London in 2015.

Away from newspapers and galleries, McNay had played hooker for London Scottish and remained devoted to rugby. He had three children, Lois and Ross from his marriage to Marian Milne, and Anna from his marriage to fellow Guardian subeditor Sue Pilkington. He was also a grandfather of five.

McNay's work persists in the physical evidence he cared about: a cleaner front page, photographs allowed to carry meaning, artists examined with seriousness, and books that led readers into studios and overlooked places. His pages made design part of journalism's argument, while his criticism and obituaries kept the artists themselves at the center.