Arthur Sleigh’s paper and the printer who took it over.

The Daily Telegraph started with a longer title and a short life under its founder. BBC News, in a profile of the paper dated 19 January 2004, wrote that The Daily Telegraph and Courier was founded by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Sleigh, and that the opening edition, four pages long, appeared on 29 June 1855. The paper did not make enough money to pay its printers, the firm of J. M. Levy, the BBC said, and in September the printer took the paper over, made his son co-editor and relaunched it.

English Wikipedia gives the names behind that handover. It says Joseph Moses Levy, then owner of The Sunday Times, had agreed to print the paper, and that after taking it over he appointed his son Edward Levy-Lawson, later Lord Burnham, and Thornton Leigh Hunt to edit it. The title was shortened to The Daily Telegraph. The same article says the paper’s motto, “Was, is, and will be”, appeared in an emblem used from 1858 for more than a century.

The paper settled on Fleet Street early. Press Gazette, reporting on 29 June 2015 on a four-page history supplement the paper printed for its birthday, wrote that the offices moved from the Strand to 135 Fleet Street in 1860 and stayed there until 1987, when they moved to Canary Wharf, and that the paper has been based in the Victoria area of London since 2006. The same report said a Sunday edition launched in 1899 lasted only weeks, and that The Sunday Telegraph began in 1961.

Ownership passed out of the founding family in the twentieth century. English Wikipedia says that in 1928 Harry Levy-Lawson, the second Baron Burnham, sold the paper to William Berry, later Viscount Camrose, in partnership with his brother Gomer Berry and Edward Iliffe. In 1937 the paper absorbed The Morning Post, and for some years it carried the combined title The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post before returning to its own name, the same article says. Press Gazette gives the same year for the merger with the Morning Post.

New owners in 1986 and 2004, a gothic masthead redrawn in 2015.

The Berry and Burnham families stayed in management for decades. English Wikipedia says both remained involved until the Canadian businessman Conrad Black, through companies he controlled, bought the Telegraph Group in 1986. In 2004 the group was bought by the brothers David and Frederick Barclay, the same article says. BBC News reported on 19 January 2004 that a takeover bid had been unveiled that week. In October 2006, with its move to Victoria, the company took the name Telegraph Media Group, according to English Wikipedia, and on 2 September 2008 the paper was printed with colour on every page after its printing moved to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire.

The nameplate is set in a gothic, or blackletter, style, and its form has changed over the years. Eye magazine, in a blog post by John L. Walters dated 29 June 2015, wrote that the paper had used a solid version of its masthead since 2003. For the paper’s 160th anniversary that year, the creative director Jon Hill commissioned Paul Barnes of Commercial Type to draw a new masthead, which Eye described as a return to the inline lettering of earlier Telegraph mastheads. Press Gazette, the same day, described the change as reinstating the paper’s traditional gothic masthead, and said the refreshed masthead would also be rolled out to the website and apps.

The type below the masthead changed at the same time. Eye said Hill commissioned Austin News from Barnes for the main news stories and display copy, a new version of the Austin family that Barnes had originally drawn for the magazine Harpers & Queen. Barnes also designed two bespoke faces for the paper, Telesans and Telesans Agate, and supplied new versions of his inline family Marian, called Marian Display and Marian Poster. Press Gazette reported that the editor Chris Evans, in a letter to readers, said Austin would be used for headlines and body text and that the main type size was increasing, which would mean slightly fewer words in the paper. Eye added that The Sunday Telegraph received a new masthead from Barnes as well.

The crest was redrawn by hand. Eye said the crest carries the motto “Was, is & will be” and the date 1855, and that the new version was a simulated linocut made by the Suffolk artist Celia Hart, whose work draws on the traditions of Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Hill, the magazine reported, had found the previous crest “cold and vectorised”, and argued that the paper “should be proud of its wrinkles and battle scars” rather than copy the look of its online rivals.

A gothic nameplate, an inline revival and a hand-cut crest.

A newspaper’s title can stay fixed while the pages beneath it change. English Wikipedia says the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, first published in Frankfurt on 1 November 1949, altered its traditional layout on 5 October 2007 to carry colour photographs on the front page and replaced blackletter type everywhere except the nameplate. German Wikipedia says the lettering of that title, designed by Regina May, has stayed typographically unchanged, and that in October 2011 the paper’s website gave up its own logo for the printed Fraktur head.

A change of page size works the same way. English Wikipedia says The Sydney Morning Herald, a Sydney title since 1831, moved its weekday paper from broadsheet to compact with effect from March 2013, following The Times in London, and printed its Saturday edition as a broadsheet for the last time on 22 February 2014. The name at the top, fixed since 1842, carried across to the smaller sheet. When reading a newspaper’s identity, look at which parts of the masthead have stayed unchanged, which parts of the page were redrawn, and the dates on which each change was made.

One gothic title, a motto in a crest and a long chain of owners.

The paper’s ownership changed again in the 2020s. Press Gazette reported on 30 June 2026 that the German publisher Axel Springer was completing its acquisition of The Telegraph that day, ending three years in which the title had been without a settled owner.

The 2015 redesign reached well beyond the front page. Eye reported that Austin was due to appear across the paper’s website and apps and already featured, alongside Marian, in its fashion and beauty sections, and that the Saturday motoring section made bold use of Marian Poster. The design team, the magazine said, was led by Hill. Taken together, the masthead, the crest and the text faces were all redrawn in one season for the anniversary.

The two elements that frame the page have stayed recognisable through these changes. The gothic title has moved between inline and solid forms but kept its blackletter shape, and the crest has kept the motto and the founding date while being redrawn in a softer, hand-made style. The name has also stayed close to its origins: the courier of 1855 dropped away early, the Morning Post was added and later removed, and the title settled as The Daily Telegraph.

For a design guide, The Daily Telegraph shows how a newspaper can modernise its type and its page while reaching back to an older form of its own nameplate, and how a hand-made crest can sit beside a set of new bespoke typefaces. Compare The Guardian, a London daily that has also redesigned its nameplate, or Financial Times, another London daily. For this guide we use stone, blue and black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep The Daily Telegraph’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.