chuq (Chuq Von Rospach) (06/02/88)
Well, I think it's time to start A Controversy, and I finally found
what I hope is an interesting one.
Publish! magazine has done a complete makeover of itself in the June
issue, and asked for comments from it's readers about whether or not
they improved things. I think it'd be an interesting discussion here as
well as a way of opening up a discussion of design concepts in general.
To get the ball rolling, here's a few observations that I've got based
on studying the magazine for a few hours.
In general, I think the makeover is an improvement. The magazine looks
more professional, more finished. It's opened up and more attractive.
It's not perfect.
One thing they've done that I really like is move away from what I've been
calling a "baroque" look -- lots of italic or cursive text. A lot of DTP
publications use a lot of italics because of limited font selections and the
need for something distinctive. With the proliferation of good headline faces,
this isn't necessary any more, and Publish! has nicely designed this out of
their magazine.
(As a completely unrelated comment, I've completely revamped
OtherRealms in somewhat similar ways, zapping all my use of italics and
Zapf Chancery for a selection of Univers faces. I think every designer
goes through a baroque phase where they simply love Old English typefaces
and cursive scripts. And they wake up one morning and realize it looks
really rather silly, which it does....)
Things that work:
o The Table of Contents. It's NICE. Very nice, and a big improvement. I don't
think it's perfect (The headers for the various sections, like
"On the Cover" or "Features" would be better in a heavier face,
and I'd probably Right Justify them so they stood out a little better
from the article titles, but these are nits).
o The article titles. You now have a good, very strong identifier for the
start of an article with the bleeding boxes. They've really opened
up the start of articles and made the titles and blurbs stand out.
Really nice.
o The new body face (ITC New Baskerville) is a good choice. I'm going to
have to go back and take a second look at it (I've been considering
Garamond, but then so is everyone else, since I can't seem to find
a copy in stock....). Switching to justified text gives the
magazine a new dignity that I like.
Things that don't:
o The new logo. When I got my copy, the first thing I did was cringe, because
even before I opened it up, I saw the logo on the cover and realized
they'd done a makeover. The old one was really cutesy. The new one
is very geometrical and angular. It's also very, very boring.
It's quite tall and narrow, and they added to the problems by putting
it in a blackout box. The only word that really fits what they've
done is "squished" because that's what it looks like. It looks,
frankly, over-kerned and tight.
My general feeling on it is that they switched from a baroque logo
to a hyper-modern one, and it doesn't fit them any better than
the old one did. They'd be better off giving the logo a little
more room to breathe and either widening the characters or lopping
off a little of the height. Either way, the logo has serious
perspective problems. Whenever I look at it, I feel like I'm looking
at it via a carnival mirror.
o white type. They're using LOTS of white type in black boxes. Too much.
A really nasty example is on page 12, which is horrible. (It's also
not repeated elsewhere, so perhaps they realized it was bad, but
couldn't go fix it). I don't know about you, but while white type
really draws your eye to it, it is also generallly unreadable. They
could have had the same impact with colored or grey boxes (see P. 58
and 59, for instance) without the glaring contrasts. Occasionally
is okay for impact, but they go way overboard. (again, as a side
comment, I've designed all the white type out of the next OtherRealms
for many of the same reasons, long before I saw this issue).
o The masthead. Page 4. The type is way too small. It's completely
unreadable to use that type with this printing process on this
paper. Total botch.
o Small Caps. They should either use a lighter face or get rid or the
small caps. Putting them together makes the text unreadable and
it attracts too much attention. Compare, for instance, the
headlines on page 25 with the "DTP: Making it in Japan" headline on
page 31.
o Too many faces. If you look at pages 32-33, you see lots and lots of
headlines and a bunch of different design concepts. This honestly
looks like the pages where they were prototyping stuff. They need
to decide on a single style for stuff and go with it. too noisy.
o Too heavy faces. In many cases, they use a face that is too heavy for
the size they are printing. See page 35: "The latest books..."
as a practical example. It's so heavy the openings in the letters
have basically gone away, and the text looks almost characaturish.
The size is right, but a lighter face would improve readability
significantly without reducing the impact significantly. They're
trying for a lot of black and a lot of contrast on the pages,
and simply are going too far.
In balance, it's better. But there are some things I consider basic flaws
that I'm surprised they let get through.
What do you folks think?
chuq
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with a subject line of helphburford@enprt.Wichita.NCR.COM (Harry Burford) (06/07/88)
|>Publish! magazine has done a complete makeover of itself in the June |>issue, and asked for comments from it's readers about whether or not |>they improved things. I think it'd be an interesting discussion here as |>well as a way of opening up a discussion of design concepts in general. |>What do you folks think? I think they made a major step backward rather than forward in their redesign. I got my copy the other day and it sat in the in basket for quite a while. Had to search for the title since they went with the VERY narrow and TALL cover name. Yuk! The old style wasn't quite Old English, but you could definitly read it across the room and you KNEW what magazine it was. Take a trip to the magazine store and look at all of them lined up on the rack. Which one gets your attention and makes you want to read it. For me, its not the new and improved Publish! layout. I guess I'm going to have to spend additional time when I go thru mags. and digest the layout as well as the information in them. Often, when I'm in a time crunch, I'll quickly thumb thru a mag reading the high points and then saving the details for later. I really had to work to figure out what pages were ads and what pages had articles, and where those articles started. I got the impression that the Publish! folks told their design staff to include as many DTP tricks as they could in the magazine and not to be conserned with readability. For example, how about the article starting on Pg. 70. Screened box and art on EVERY page and placed in such a way that a reader has to stop reading to find the top of the next column. To complicate things further they even did a wrap around on page 75. The 7 line tall enlarged first character of each section adds to the confusion. Really looks sharp! I'm going to frame the mag. and hang it on the wall. Its by far too hard to read. There you have it Chuq. You wanted to generate feedback. -- Harry Burford - NCR E & M Wichita, Printer Engineering PHONE: 316-636-8016 FAX: 316-636-8889 Harry.Burford@Wichita.NCR.COM C-Serve: 76367,151 ---------------------------------------- Submissions to: desktop@plaid.sun.com Administrivia to: desktop-request@plaid.sun.com UUCP: {amdahl,decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!sun!plaid!desktop{-request} Archives can be gotten from the archive-server. To get information on the archive-server, send mail to: archive-server@plaid.sun.com -or- sun!plaid!archive-server with a subject line of help
jonson@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Mary D Johnson) (06/07/88)
Sorry no controversy here, Chuq--I am in complete agreement with
you. While the overall makeover makes the magazine a lot more readable--
the over reliance on San Francisco cute and an overabundance of Univers
type makes me think that they may have swung the pendulum far to the
opposite side. Why, oh why is the mid range so hard to find?
I have spent the last four years at the cutting edge (ouch) of the
desktop publishing revolution, having done Bantam Books first DTP
book, on the Mac with a Laserprinter for a San Francisco book packager
who shall remain nameless. As with others, some of Publish's makeovers
were better left undone. Let us hope that their recent change will
grow into a really effective transition.
[moderator's kibbitz: part of the problem, I think, was outlined in the
discussion in Publish! -- that when you get so involved in a design
or a makeover, you can easily get to a point where you no longer
see the work objectively. You're so involved in the details that
you can't really see how everything works together anymore.
Two other things, I think, contributed to it. First, I get the impression
that they didn't put together a full prototype of the issue, rather they
went with it live [this could well be wrong -- but there are design aspects
that you see in one part of the magazine that disappear in the rest, which
implies to me that they were tweaking the design as they went along]. Also,
I think an unspoken intent of the design was to show off as much DTP
techno-toys as humanly possible, which makes the thing WAY too busy.
-- chuq]
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