Chicken delight: Poultry's brand new look is a winning recipe for better accessibility, structure and sophistication

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Jan, 2002 by Robert Newman

COVER DESIGN

The original cover design of Poultry was very generic and looked like countless other trade magazines. Its new look is modern, crisp and bold. cutting up the cover image into a defined square that is not a full-bleed is a smart move--it gives the cover a very distinctive look and plays to the strengths of the photo. If there's a flaw in this approach it's that the main head and its subhead do not connect well.

The new logo, however, is a turkey. It does not seem to connect, either by font or style, with anything else in the redesign. The chopped-off letters and the way it's jammed into the space on top works at odds with the rest of the cover. It seems to be a half-baked attempt at edginess and is very out of place. I'm a fan of the old logo--refined a bit, it would have made a nice counterpoint to the new, modern look, and given the magazine some flavor and a sense of continuity.

TYPOGRAPHY/GRAPHICS

The editors did not chicken out; this is a total redesign, not just a cosmetic makeover, and it's a great improvement. This is a model for how a trade title can brighten and focus, while still maintaining authority and integrity for its audience.

The old display type was clunky, generic and outdated. By switching to a contemporary, popular face, Knockout, for their display type, Poultry has given itself typographic respectability.

However, I'm not a fan of the choice of a sans serif face exclusively for text throughout the magazine. The word spacing is just awful--there are ugly, distracting gaps between words all over. They either need to switch to ragged text, fix their justifications, or switch to a text font that sets better.

ACCESSIBILITY

The new architecture is a huge improvement. The magazine has been sliced up into sections, each led by a strong, well-designed feature or spread. There's a much better sense of organization and structure. Consistent, distinctive running heads tie the magazine together, and formatted white space has been added to every page to give a much more sophisticated feel. The new color palette helps define each section, and there are nice graphic touches on each page.

COMMENTS

Overall, this is a blue-ribbon redesign. They've taken the original recipe and made it much tastier, brighter and authoritative. continued development of the design will continue to give Poultry a leg-up.

RELATED ARTICLE: AT A glance

COMPANY: Gold Kist Inc.

HEADQUARTERS: Atlanta

SALES: $1.8 billion (year ended 6/00)

EMPLOYEES: 17,500

PLANTS: 12

KEY DEVELOPMENTS: After 16 years with the privately held cooperative, John Bekkers assumed the CEO mantle in July, succeeding longtime chief executive Gaylord Coan. The company recently rolled out its new Dish in a Dash retail line, hoping to make further inroads into the value-added, further processed market.