These included a request for submissions to a photography competition sponsored by Kodak: 'If you've got a photograph of San Serriffe, Kodak would like to see it.' Reception However, the newspaper realised that a larger, more in-depth review would generate greater revenue by running themed advertising alongside the text. Initially, the supplement featuring the fictitious archipelago was to be a single page. Geoffrey Taylor designed the semicolon-shaped map of the island, based on a shrunken version of New Zealand. Special Reports editor Stuart St Clair Legge suggested the name San Serriffe.

I was thinking about April Fool's Day 1977 and I thought, why don't we just make a country up?'. In a 2007 interview he said 'The Financial Times was always doing special reports on little countries I'd never heard of. The idea for the hoax came from the Guardian′s Special Reports Manager Philip Davies. In April 2009 the geography, history and culture of San Serriffe featured heavily in the paper's cryptic crossword. The nation was reused for similar hoaxes in 1978, 19. San Serriffe was one of the most famous and successful hoaxes of recent decades it has become part of the common cultural heritage of literary humour, and a secondary body of literature has been derived from it. Because of this late move the authors made San Serriffe a moving island – a combination of coastal erosion on its west side and deposition on the east cause it to move towards Sri Lanka, with which it will eventually collide, at about 1.4 km/year. The original idea was to place the island in the Atlantic Ocean near Tenerife, but because of the ground collision of two Boeing 747s there a few days before publication it was moved to the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles Islands. The supplement provided an elaborate description of the nation as a tourist destination and developing economy, but most of its place names and characters were puns and plays on words relating to printing (such as ' sans-serif' and names of common fonts).

It was featured in a seven-page hoax supplement, published in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the island's independence, complete with themed advertisements from major companies.

San Serriffe is a fictional island nation invented for April Fools' Day 1977, by Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Guardian newspaper font