When I opened my New York Times Magazine yesterday and saw that it had undergone a redesign, my first thought was "Again?" It seems like just yesterday (though it was really June 09) that the magazine revealed new alterations to its appearance, and while this latest batch of changes is more comprehensive, it does strike me as being a little redundant.
Over the past month, certain columnists have bid low key adieus (one of which will be the focus of Part Two of this post) amid announcements of new (to the magazine, not the Times) voices coming in, like Mark Bittman, so it makes sense that the editor, Hugo Lindgren, would hitch a redesign to the content makeover (admittedly, I would probably do the same thing). In his editor's letter introducing the changes, Lindgren writes about the "how, what and why" of the new design and he loftily sums up the latter as an attempt to answer the "puzzling question, in this moment of technological upheaval, of how to intensify the experience of reading a print magazine."
I admire the Times for continuing to print its magazine and for valuing design aesthetics and the goals of the magazine staff enough to back a redesign, but I don't know if this is really the best venue to make a case for an intensification of the print reading experience. First off, the magazine isn't a stand-alone entity; it comes wrapped in two inches of newsprint and I doubt that the Times is going to sway new (youthful) readers to buy a $6 paper just for the experience of reading its magazine in print, when those readers can have access to the whole kit and caboodle for free online. (Yes, the NYT's online business model is soon to change, but I don't believe attaching a price will make readers revert to print if they are digitally inclined. They will probably just shell out the dough or go elsewhere.)
Secondly, the physical specs of the magazine don't jibe with the high-flying redesign goal. It's hard to convince a reader that the design is improving the print experience when the paper stock is so thin that you can see through what was meant to be a visually soothing expanse of white spice accompanying editorial content to the ad on the other side. Or when knocked out text has a slight fuzz to it because the paper can't hold ink very well. Or—the hallmark of paper reading— when the ink rubs off on your fingers leaving smudges in the magazine and on your face.
This isn't all to say design isn't important or can't improve readability or Lindgren and his team are fools for trying something new, but to me this redesign (unlike the last one which directly responded to the cost-cutting page size reduction) is at best a lateral shift—not an improvement—and at worst, futile. As my husband said yesterday when he glanced at the magazine, "What's the point, newspapers are already dead."
Images courtesy of the New York Times