If you think of a magazine as like a
person, the design is the clothing and the body language
all wrapped into one. It's like the body language because
the magazine design sends a signal saying I am friendly
and accessible, or unfriendly and inaccesible; I am
elegant or I'm dull. I am exciting, interesting or not
so.
Design is like clothing, because you have to
account for fashion. Just as we change our clothes and
our wardrobe periodically, magazines have to be
redesigned. Even good clothes wear out. The standard in
much of the magazine industry is redesigning every three
or four years. Obviously, we don't have the resources to
do that. What we do have to do is redesign periodically
to maintain the interest of those people who are reading
our magazine, and hopefully to evoke interest in those
people who are not reading our magazine.
We need to make the magazine design more
exciting, more inviting, more accessible and put together
a package that is more attractive to advertisers.
As I said, fashions change, even trends in
typefaces change and magazines have to change to look
fresh to their readers, otherwise the readers get tired of
them, even if they like the content. One thing that you
are going to see, you're going to see a lot of type and a
lot of illustrations. This is a model of what the
magazine is going to look like. It is not the first issue
of the new design, which will be rolled out in January,
2001. Some photographs and illustrations you may
recognize because they are from past editions of the
magazine. Others you may not recognize at all. They were
from stock photographs held by our design team.
Some of the headlines you may recognize. We
took them from past magazines. With that introduction,
let me begin.
What you're going to see in general, I'll say
it once, because it will apply to a lot of pages you're
going to see, a design we think is cleaner, more open,
more accessible, and a design that will appear visually to
a large audience.
This is a typical cover of the magazine. New
logo using helvetica type, sans serif type, which we
haven't used in a long time on the front of the magazine,
that style of type.
Notice what's called a deck. The list of
stories on top of the logo and also more stories listed
down on the side. We want to try to do two things at one
time, which may be singly contradictory; have the color of
the publication be as strong as it can be and also give
readers an idea of what the content inside is going to be.
What we're going to strive for every month is
to have as much information on the cover as possible, at
the same time, not detract from the photograph or
illustration. You'll also notice familiar elements,; the
date, the website, our website, will be much more in
evidence in the magazine. I'm not sure it's going to be
on the cover every month, but it is on this prototype and
it will be more prominent in the magazine.
This is what we call our celebrity cover.
The idea of a celebrity cover is not just to put a
celebrity on the cover for the sake of a celebrity.
Obviously, it will be tied to a legitimate story in the
magazine. We wouldn't put a picture of a celebrity on the
cover unless we had an article inside. This proved to be
extremely popular in the focus groups, so I include that
in the mix for you.
And this is what we think of as a situation
cover. It could relate to an article or even a theme
issue, that is health oriented and this also was very
popular in the focus groups.
This is the table of contents. A lot of
things different here. The first thing you'll notice is
it's two pages instead of one. It's a spread. We think
it's easier to read and the focus groups bore us out on
that.
It uses more photos than we ever used on
contents before, including at least one large photo, which
often may be tied to a cover story. Various sections,
divisions of the magazine, features, columns and
departments are easily accessible, and we could do this
either right hand or left hand. We'll probably alternate
in different issues.
This is an example of some of the magazine's
regular departments. This is the letter from the
president. This is an article that actually ran in the
magazine after the last convention. Again, it's a more
open design. We see a lot more white space around the
headline. This is where you get a chance to see the new
body type we are using. In general, it's a livlier page
and we're going to have tinted boxes along the sides of
the margin.
This is a typical treatment of a feature of
the magazine. This is actually a story that ran in a
recent theme issue. You'll notice here that again there's
a lot more white space, almost the top half of the page of
the right-hand side is white surrounding the headline.
The full page photo on the left, which we have done
occasionally in the past, we're going to try to do it much
more often now with this design. We think the whole
spread is more inviting, and we want the reader to try to
get into it.
Another thing, the type begins with a very
large font for the first five lines and then it tapers
down to a smaller font. That's also designed to entice
the reader to start the article and hopefully with a few
good leads they'll be hooked.
These are pages 3 and 4 of the same feature
that you just saw. It is actually on the inside pages of
the feature that we learn some of the more interesting
lessons from the focus groups.
You'll notice there's more variety on the
page. We have a blurb in color which uses different type
sizes to attract people. We have tinted boxes. We have
photographs. Just a lot more variety on the page.