Flightless fancy - American Ostrich - Brief Article

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 1994

When it first made the transition from newsletter to magazine, the official publication of the American Ostrich Association was black and white, called Ostrich Report, and carried mostly technical articles with a focus on providing information to breeders. Because of the somewhat dry nature of the subject matter, however, the association decided to re-invigorate its magazine with new graphics, giving the title a more professional appearance and better reader appeal.

"The trades need to allow more fun in their magazines to make them more readable," says Robert Ayers, a principal in Ayers/Johanek Publication Design, located in Bozeman, Montana, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. For a start, Ostrich Report assumed a new logo and title, American Ostrich, effective with the February issue. American Ostrich also adopted a new imposition. Where formerly it had been hard to tell where ads left off and articles began, now the editorial well is more unified, with ads placed in such a way as to minimize interruption of the flow of articles. Color spreads predominate, with illustrations and story headlines like "Shopping for Chicks" replacing the more trade-like, "Behavior and trends in meat consumption."

Another change is the bolder, updated and condensed text typeface used to enhance the photos, which now appear in color. Decks, formerly nonexistent, are also in color. Organization is key to the redesign: Section leaders help arrange departments, and the overlapping initial cap seen in the logo is employed for section heads, callouts and decks. Uniformity of fonts in the heads and decks also achieves greater continuity, and where Ostrich Report carried an abundance of rules and boxes to distinguish text, American Ostrich relies on color.