"On its 25th birthday, The Independent faces the future with just the same mixture of optimism and understandable worries as when the first issue appeared." says its first editor Andreas Whittam Smith in a recently published text that celebrates the silver wedding anniversary of the newspaper. It's been 25 years since October 7, 1986. 25 years, 7,796 editions, five owners, eight directors and numerous transformations; symptoms of what is arguably the most competitive and dynamic media market the world and also possibly due the intrinsic difficulties of the project.

The Independent is, as of today, the last prestigious newspaper launched in the UK and, it must be said, also the lowest in circulation and the one with the most difficulties. Only seven journalists of the founding team are still working at the newspaper. Among them is its current Paris correspondent, John Lichfield, who has written an emotional personal testimony for the occasion. Also the legendary Robert Fisk. Recently, Simon Kelner, the paper’s great editor during recent years, has left, as has Adam Leigh, his deputy, the man who led the last great transformation and the birth of low-cost daily “i”, a sort of condensed version of its older brother.

But it has come so far. It has been owned since March 2010 by the Russian father and son Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, who also purchased the late-edition Evening Standard. It has been run since July 2011 by Chris Blackhurst, who took the reins from the previous team.

In this difficult time of change and team transition, amid a brutal economic crisis and a no less brutal crisis in the sector, The Independent contacted Errea Communicación in May. The call was urgent. We had to reinvent the newspaper from top to bottom. Content structure and graphic design. No limits. The work done in these past months has been invigorating. All we can do is express our gratitude and admiration to Leigh, to Blackhurst and Dan Barber, the art director... Some of the more radical ideas have fallen by the wayside. But not the new header, which says a lot about what the newspaper and its managers aim to do in the coming months, at least not for the present.

The Independent newspaper has been an innovator in the best sense of the word. During this quarter century it has left many milestones in the history of British and international journalism. In 2003 it was the first prestigious newspaper in the UK to embrace the tabloid format, breaking a cultural taboo that was well-entrenched in Britain and around the world. This garnered a great deal of attention in the media, and equally important, brought about an almost immediate shift at The Times and The Guardian It was also the first British newspaper to launch a Saturday magazine and to make a firm commitment to its weekend edition.

Now, once again, The Independent has reinvented itself. It has completely changed its lay-out, dropping the main feature section of analysis and opinion, Viewspaper, and moving to a more compact formula, mixing news and opinion in a more natural way. And lowering the price to one pound. Not a bad start. The graphic line aims to complement these changes and give the product greater visibility, more power and sophistication. The Independent needed to have its own voice, distinct from that of the major leading newspapers and, of course, the strident voice of the tabloids. Welcome.