Monday 14 May 2007
TIME magazine has undergone its first major redesign in 13 years. Digital Arts spoke to the creative team charged with its reinvention.
Above: The redesigned Time cover.
TIME magazine is, perhaps, the world’s leading international news magazine. Published weekly, it combines hard-hitting news and analysis with award-winning design, as well as business, science, and society features.
Recognized as a barometer of world events, the people-driven magazine, along with its famed TIME Person of the Year, was launched in 1923 as the first weekly news magazine in the US.
It’s a magazine with a rich heritage, and one that for any redesign to succeed, needed to undergo carefully orchestrated change.
“TIME hadn’t undergone a major redesign in more than 13 years, so for quite a while we felt like we needed to update and modernize the format,” says TIME art director Arthur Hochstein.
“The magazine had drifted away from a discipline and coherence that mark a successful design. This feeling was heightened when Rick Stengel took over as managing editor.
Rick wanted to make significant structural changes that would refiect his editorial vision.”
Stengel had several priorities, says Hochstein. The first was the need for TIME to convey both clarity and ease of navigation – attributes, says Hochstein, that underscore the positioning of TIME as a place where readers can go to unpick the week’s key information and news.
Quality TIME
“He also wanted it to be beautiful to look at,” says Hochstein. “TIME isn’t trying to mimic the Internet with speedy-looking graphics or with bite-sized information nuggets.
“Rather, it is trying to be a companion to a reader’s other sources of information. It is something to read, and something to look at.”
Outside consultation was also called for, with the TIME creative team inviting three or four designers and design teams to pitch for the project.
The brief was simple: what would you do if you were reinventing the news magazine yourself? The move to pull in outside help was vital to the project’s success, reckons Hochstein.
The team felt their own assumptions and viewpoints needed challenging by people who weren’t invested into the status quo.
TIME needed to undergo a structural shift in light of the new challenges it faced. Following a month-long pitching process, TIME opted to run with Pentagram as its redesign partner.
The first challenge the two teams faced was the fine balance needed between respecting TIME’s unique and rich heritage, and ushering in a more modern treatment.
“We all assumed that we didn’t want to create something so new and unfamiliar that we would run the risk of alienating our core readership,” reveals Hochstein.
“We also knew that Pentagram wouldn’t try to push us into something we didn’t want to do, and that they would give great consideration to our visual heritage.
“When [Pentagram’s] Paula Scher and Luke Hayman began their typographic examinations, they looked at other faces, but rather quickly returned to Franklin Gothic as the primary display face.
Franklin was used by Walter Bernard in his 1977 redesign. “We had Matthew Carter re-envision it as Benton Bold Condensed, which we used up until this redesign,” says Hochstein.
“Pentagram felt that Franklin both signified news and reinforced our brand and heritage. They also felt it could be used in a fresh and modern way.”
News nuggets
With the team embedded – Luke Hayman set up an office within TIME, and TIME deputy art director Cynthia Hoffman worked with the redesign team full-time so as to ease production and editorial integration.
Headline changes involved examining the pace, type, cover, and the use of image and colour.
“Creating shorter nuggets of information wasn’t really part of the overall programme – in certain parts of the magazine it was just an outgrowth of a specific editorial need,” says Hochstein.
“The pacing structure was basically a short, long, short rhythm. The emphasis here is on content, rather than varied typography and visual pacing.
“So visually, the front and back are ‘bookends’ of more compressed information that surround a more airy, visually driven well.”
For the body face, the team picked Proforma, due to Hayman being strongly committed to a text face that imparted a sense of modernity, combined with ease of reading.
“Proforma is a face without a lot of attitude,” says Hochstein. “It’s not derived from classical roman typefaces. It’s more matter-of-fact.
“My own feeling is that it makes the magazine feel a little more objective, and a bit smarter than its predecessor.
“More important than any particular type choice, though, was its application in a crisp, disciplined format that de-emphasized type as illustration, that made type part of an overall framework for words and images.”
Colour has also been greatly simplified – with a less-is-more approach from the team. The result is a core palette that uses 100 per cent magenta, 100 per cent red, and a 100 per cent yellow for bright accents, with very few other colours deployed.
“We abandoned tinted boxes and coloured type in headlines, which is a great relief,” says Hochstein.
“We had drifted much too far in the direction of decorative type, which is the wrong approach for a serious news magazine.”
OS X factor
With the design evolving, the team developed templates as they progressed – making for a smoother transition from concept to execution.
“The most frustrating aspect is that we are still using QuarkXPress 4 on Mac OS 9. That will be corrected by the autumn of this year, when we will migrate to InDesign on OS X.
That means we had to build the templates in QuarkXPress 4, knowing that they would have to be replaced in about six months.
“This created a lot of snags, but the Pentagram team adjusted, and we will be ahead of the game when we make the transition.”
With the new-look issue now live, it’s been gathering some initial positives, says Hochstein, not least from Samir Husni, a US professor of journalism who is authoritative enough on the industry to call himself “Mr Magazine”. And, if it’s good enough for Mr Magazine, it’s good enough for us.
Matthew Bath
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