Yoga Journal Goes Women's Mag

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 1, 2004 by Robert Newman

Byline: Robert Newman Design Director, Fortune

MAG STATS

Yoga Journal

Company Yoga Journal LLC

Editor-in-chief Hillari Dowdle

Managing Editor Kaitlin Quistgaard

Design Director Sharyn Belkin Locke

Art Director Jonathan Wieder

Women's mags hardly send a Zen vibe, but that the look Yoga Journal is adopting to "reach a broader readership of newcomers to yoga,"namely younger, female readers. The result is a solid, if uninspired, freshening and refocusing of the magazine.

THE COVER

The new cover design adds energy, with type, imagery and color. Although the designers have succeeded in making a "hotter" and more dynamic cover while maintaining the general feel of serenity so integral to the magazine, the editors need to hone their headline-writing skills. The wrong words are often highlighted in the heads. Why emphasize the headline "7 STEPS," when it should be the underline? "It's Fun. It's Challenging. It's Deep," explains nothing. They are trying to mimic women's magazine headlines without the directness and simplicity of content essential to the form.

The magazine begs for an explanatory cover tagline to give readers a sense of the breadth of its content, a la the "life/home/body/soul" line of Real Simple. This kind of branding technique is sorely lacking throughout Yoga Journal.

TYPOGRAPHY & GRAPHICS

The actual typefaces appear the same, but the designers have skillfully adjusted the usage, adding more serif display type, and showing an overall lighter and more graceful touch. The features in particular are much more typographically elegant and impressive.

FRONT/BACK OF BOOK

Many of the pages, including the TOC, contributors' and editor's page, have been smartly tweaked, with added white space, refined logos and a more logical presentation of information.

The front section, Om Pages, has been completely revamped, opening on a bold cover page instead of a gray, jumbled spread. The pages following are bright and nicely ordered. However, the design is a bit too generic women's mag: Large bright color boxes with knocked-out white type and pages that mix ads and color sidebars do not enhance the section's readability.

A popular how-to feature for beginners has been expanded and now wisely opens on a spread. However, the middle of the book, before the features, remains a confusing jumble of columns and food stories. More attention should be paid to information architecture, particularly on the two-page Toronto travel story, which is a clutter of type and color with no sense of order. The basis of service journalism is easy presentation and organization of material, and Yoga Journal needs work in this area.

SUMMARY

The feature well is where the new design works best, with nice typography, use of white space and vastly upgraded photography. The pages are generally elegant and graceful, well defined and easy to follow.

That said, the service components of the features - sidebars, captions and explanatory text - need work. This information should be easy to read and follow. It needs to be deconstructed, broken up with bold lead-ins, lists and other forms of highlighting. There are too many solid gray blocks of what should be much more accessible material.

While the structural changes are a step forward, they are relatively unimaginative, following a cookie-cutter approach. A better inspiration for Yoga Journal would be O or Real Simple, which have shown how it's possible to come up with new forms of front-of-book sections.