March 4, 2008
The new Creative Review
Two reasons to buy the March issue of Creative Review; firstly, as I mentioned in an earlier post, it has been redesigned. Using the full range of Christian Schwarz’s Farnham font, art director Paul Pensom has styled the headlines and page details as typography samplers (above and below). Editorially, the headlines have been restyled to be more factual and less reliant on ugly puns.
Adding variation and character to the design in this way might have clashed with the visual content, but the rules and boxes of the samplers maintain a division of space and along with the editorial change of tack make the magazine more modern and urgent. Moving the responsibility for character away from ‘clever’ headlines to subtle typographic touches gives Creative Review more of an identity as a design magazine. Although it was always modern and clean, it now feels less generic – Franklin Gothic remains for the logo, small pieces of text and page details, but is otherwise dropped.
The redesign also wisely avoids looking too conspicuously current, and so should have a long life to develop rather than become out-dated in twelve months. This is not a surface re-styling, but a strong, intelligent redesign and, like all good reinvention, feels like it has retained scope for further development. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.
And the second reason to buy the issue? A four-page review of the Magazines Are Dead! Long Live the Magazine conference (above and below) organised by Simon Esterson and myself last month. Happily, it gets a positive response from Icon art director Violetta Boxhill-Roope, but more importantly her piece provides a good record of the speakers and event as a whole. Plus, my favourite current buzzword ‘magazine-y’ not only appears in the headline but on the front cover of the issue. Watch out for that word – it’ll appear here a lot.
4 Comments
Comment on March 4, 2008 by Michael → Boicozine says:
(Type Geek Alert) I was kind of dreading having to sift through a whole magazine set in Farnham. Not because I don’t like the typeface, it’s just always seemed a little heavy and spikey, I guess. But it does seem to sit well as headers, body copy and captions in the redesign. Is CR Gothic their custom made monoline version of Franklin Gothic? Is that still in there somewhere? And whatever happened to Vogue’s monoline version of Gill Sans? Can someone release these for us so we can all have a play with them?
Comment on March 5, 2008 by jeremy says:
I was surprised at the choice of Farnham, but I think that’s one of the big successes of the project – using an unfashionable typeface and making it such a key part of the look.
Comment on March 5, 2008 by Steven says:
I’m a fan of the new structure and navigation. Works really well.
Comment on March 7, 2008 by Carlo says:
CR could do something really good, really fun – because people would still buy it. Instead it’s tentative, internet influenced design. The stuff we see around us every day, produced by people on committees worried about sales figures and in the process ham-stringing themselves. Crikey! let’s have some real surprise me ideas.
PS Monocle is tedious beyond belief. Yawn.
