The Good Girl's Gone Bad

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct 1, 2003

Byline: Critique by Ina Saltz, principal, Saltz Design

MAG STATS

Teen People

Company: Time Inc.

Managing Editor: Amy Barnett

Publisher: Paul J. Caine

Creative director: Jill Armus

Mission: According to Barnett: "To create a magazine that reflects our readers' lives and their aesthetic." The magazine aims to create a three-dimensional look that teens can relate to.

The cover logo is almost 20 percent larger, and the cover line typography is weightier, bolder, and louder...but inside is where the radical makeover of the formerly staid and safe Teen People really rocks. A sweeping change has taken place: Watch out - the good girl's gone bad! This redesign is the visual equivalent of your bobby soxer coming home with tattoos, piercings and a major attitude. But isn't rebelliousness what teenhood is all about?

TYPOGRAPHY & GRAPHICS

The tidy layouts, pretty colors, and sweetly rounded text and picture boxes have given way to graphic anarchy: edgy typography, with headlines and other display text scratchily hand-outlined or stamped out in a woven texture, deliberately misaligned, lots and lots of hand-lettered scrawling, (there are so many different styles that it looks as if everyone on staff took a shot at it), silhouetted figures surrounded by a thick rough-cut edge of raw color, text blocks with hand-drawn circles around them or faux marker highlighted text (as if a friend were pointing out the "really good parts"). The photography is edgier, too: previously wholesome fashion features are nowhere to be seen. Instead, October's redesign fashion features are "Heavy Metal" and "Boy Crazy," with rock chicks The Donnas modeling gangsta-inspired separates. One complaint: the foldout two-sided poster of Justin Timberlake in the June/July issue delivers; in October, the "Bonus Poster" of hunky Travis Fimmel is only...one page! I'd feel gypped, if I were a teenager.

ACCESSIBILITY

Without the familiar repetitive visual cues, and with an unfortunate confusion between ad and edit, navigability may suffer. Still, I predict that teens will find this redesign irresistible, if only because Teen People has finally come to reflect the true state of teen life: MTV, gaming, club fashion, and the influence of the edgier teen magazines, such as Transworld Skateboarding and Freeze. Many of the old departments have survived, albeit with a new identity. The boxed captions of "Star Tracks," which seemed forced, have morphed into cartoon "speech" balloons containing fabricated "snide" comments. "Busted" (a favorite) has been expanded, and "Trends" has become "Trendspotters," where teens tell the editors what's hot, instead of the other way around. And "Flashback," although redesigned, is in its familiar last page position.

SUMMARY

Taking a huge leap from a safe and structured design, (hard to believe this in-your-face redesign was approved by the powers that be at conservative Time Inc.), Teen People has made an unquestionably revolutionary transition...the rebellious spirit of the design seems on target, but will the visual tricks become tired after a few issues? After all, teen trends and styles are as fleeting as ...a teen's attention span.