In the Redesign Kitchen with Martha

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2002 by Sarah Gonser

Byline: Sarah Gonser

Nobody carves a pumpkin quite like Martha. While most of us are satisfied to scrape out a cockeyed jack-o'-lantern and call it a day, Martha doesn't rest until she's constructed a full-blown fright factory, complete with eerily glowing pumpkin tombstones (based on inscriptions found in eighteenth-century burial grounds) and haunted two-story mansions with swinging shutters and rooftop shingles. And what MS-concocted scare-fest would be complete without a thorough foray into the paranormal? Did you know, for instance, that the earliest recorded ghost appeared in ancient Greece? And that the spookiest estates can be found in St. Louis? It's all in the October issue of Martha Stewart Living. No surprise, really. When Martha preps for Halloween, she leaves no headstone unturned.

Therefore, when the doyenne of domestic design put her mind to a redesign of MSL, the centerpiece of her multimedia empire, the same no-detail-is-too-tiny mentality applied. Fonts were crafted from scratch; templates, grids, color palettes, and style sheets became an everyday obsession. The office turned into an aesthetics test kitchen where the design crew cooked up a new look for two painstaking years. "You can't put a comma in that magazine without having a committee meeting," says one MSL freelancer, "so no one was surprised that it took so long."

Redesigns are risky business, and in its 11-year history, Martha's magazine has gone under the X-Acto knife only once before, for a minor face-lift in 1996. But the newsstand had grown crowded with me-too competition. "People were always emulating us, "says Eric Pike, the executive creative director. "In a lot of ways we created a trend in magazines. No one was as clean and book-like as we were. The market was about busyness, layers of information, dingbats, and design tricks to keep people engaged." Three National Magazine Awards later (two for photography and one for design), MSL had proved a little too inspirational. To stop the blatant borrowing and defend its turf on the newsstand, the designers had to create something that couldn't be easily copied.

There were other motives as well. Between the mid 90s and 2002, the magazine's circulation grew by 40 percent, and as it collected more readers, it drew more ad pages. More ad pages meant more content, and soon the TOC was teeming with dozens of departments and sections - to the point where MSL's clean design had become cluttered. And as all Martha fans know, clutter is definitely not a good thing. "The front-of-book became really, really fat," says creative director Gael Towey. "We felt it was getting harder to navigate."

Then there was the typeface. "I knew it needed to be bigger," says Barbara de Wilde, the art director. "My sister is a librarian, and she said, 'I'm not going to read your magazine until the type is bigger.'" Plus, the words bite-sized kept coming up in focus groups. Readers were looking for quicker hits of information rather than long, flowing text, according to Margaret Roach, the editor-in-chief. "People seem to want to get to the point more quickly." The team was also looking to freshen a title that was, frankly, in jeopardy of growing a bit stale.

Finally, there was the sticky situation of evolving the magazine by creating an identity that was less reliant on Martha herself. [See "The Perils of Namesake Branding," this page.]

With the October 2002 issue, Martha Stewart Living unveiled a revitalized magazine. Touting a new specially commissioned font, larger photographs, an overhauled FOB, and a multitude of charts, grafts, and lists, the redesign also introduced new and tweaked columns and sections.

The results of the two-year effort are subtle, says Towey. The design is more methodical. In fact, one MSL freelancer says the entire process was an exercise in meticulousness: "They pinned mockups all over the wall, and there were days when Eric, Gael, and Martha would just stand and stare at them for hours."

To illustrate the thinking behind the redesign (and to shed some light on why it took so long), the MSL team took FOLIO: on a backstage tour of the revamped magazine.

PHOTOGRAPHY

The mass of how-to instructions in MSL can make even the most daring domestic goddess feel a little overwhelmed. "For 11 years we've been looking for that perfect place where our readers aren't given too much information - which makes it look too difficult - yet there's enough information so that they can successfully complete the project," says Towey. "[The redesign] tried to make everything simpler, to calm it down."

To clean out the clutter, the team played with photography. "It's the same, but cleaner," says Towey. "We're putting fewer photographs on the page, and they're larger and easier to see. We didn't want the typography to overwhelm the photography - we wanted the photography to be the hero."

The redesigned pages have also been "aired out maybe 10 percent," says Pike. "There's more white space," adds Roach. "We peeled back a little bit of the 'too much' to make the essence come out."