THE GUARDIAN ran an obituary last week of John Morgan, the typographer who designed Common Worship. For more than ten years, Morgan worked with the Church of England to produce the suite of liturgical resources which now constitute (with the Book of Common Prayer) the Church’s authorised liturgy.

Common Worship broke away from the idea of a single volume containing practically everything that you might ever need in church. This ideal had been retained by the provisional Alternative Service Book 1980 until 2000. Now, there would be several volumes: the Sunday black book, the weekday Daily Prayer red book, Pastoral Services, Times and Seasons, etc. I have them all on my shelf.

The most striking aspect of Common Worship was its appearance on the page. It was new to find texts surrounded by lots of white space, bold type to indicate congregational participation, thin but strong paper, and plain red headings. The chosen typeface, Gill Sans, gave Common Worship a freshness and clarity that made it easier for both children and the visually challenged to read.

It was an extraordinary achievement, although, 25 years on, the only volume that I regularly use in church is the red Daily Prayer book. The Sunday black book, through no fault of the designer, is not easy to use because of all the options. It is difficult to follow any order of service straight through from the page, in spite of a black and a red ribbon.

In reality, it had become impossible to make an intelligible Sunday prayer book containing everything within one volume — holy communion, pastoral Offices, Psalter, and Sunday morning and evening prayer — in modern and traditional versions. Even before Common Worship was produced, the Church was moving to a form of directory worship, in which churches were expected, even encouraged, to produce their own bespoke booklets, or to project worship texts on to screens.

Once booklets and screens became normative, the neat elegance of Gill Sans and the spaciousness of the text on the page was sacrificed, as was any sense of “normative” liturgy. The desire to change texts season by season, or even week by week, became overwhelming, not least because so many clergy simply enjoyed playing about with texts, experimenting with typefaces (Comic Sans, anyone?), and offering little illustrations in the margins. For some, Gill Sans became verboten because of its association with the notorious abuser Eric Gill.

Of course, if you crave the satisfaction of a palm-sized booklet, you can always download Common Worship on to a smartphone, which is fine up to a point, and gives you the nearest equivalent to John Morgan’s designs, Gill Sans, red headings, white space, and all. This is fine, until you lose connectivity in the middle of a reading, as I did once, during choral evensong. Thank you, and R.I.P., John Morgan.