Change by design: a look at eight redesigns - why they were done and what they achieved

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1990 by David Merrill

He adds that "Readers endorse the changes. But we know that a publication on the cutting edge of entrepreneurship must remain as relevant and innovative as the businesses it serves."

And, interestingly, he adds, "Our cover is brighter, fresher, crisper, with very strong headline type and a more distinctive logo."

I'll bet they agree with that last part over at BusinessWeek. (More on that later.)

Nation's Business' logo is a little smaller now and dropped out of a black rectangle, making it more distinctive and certainly more noticeable from the newsstand browser's range.

On the inside of the magazine the same device is used for department headings, which is a good consistent design thread throughout.

One of the flaws in the "before" issue is that there are great seas of uninterrupted gray type, which many of us believe readers find inhibiting. The "after" version has a lot of colorful four-line cap initials, which help break up the copy. Other publications use crossheads or subheads, as they are variously called, or drop-out quotes for the same purpose.

Back to my comment about BusinessWeek. I couldn't say what I did about the cover without giving the designers space to respond. Michael Bierut of Vignelli Associates says, "If there is a similarity to BusinessWeek, it is much closer to the BusinessWeek of a few years ago." He went on to say that if anything, he thinks it is more similar to US. News & World Report because the "editorial thinking is similar."

Vignelli Associates consulted between the redesigns and decided to "design a format to go with the way they [the editors] seem to think." They worked backward through a whole year's worth of covers and showed management how they might have looked with the suggested new format. Bierut explains that one of the reasons for arriving at the big type covers is that Nation's Business "tends not to do people on the covers-it's more of a service magazine. We wanted to give them a fail-safe cover format. "

Another had to do with the magazine's desire to be more successful on the newsstand-which was also why they moved the alternate cover blurbs from above to below the logo.

This ensured that the logo could be seen when only the top of the magazine showed in the racks.

Ingram's

Ingram's, which carries the underline, "For Successful Kansas Citians," was acquired by Robert P. Ingram more than two years ago. According to editor Frederic Hron, the title isn't as blind as it might seem to non-Kansas Citians, since Ingram is a very well-known businessman in that city.

Originally founded in 1975 as Outlook, The Kansas City Business journal, the magazine has evolved through a series of name changes, content revamps and designs.

Editor Hron says, "We've made the changes because the media in our market have changed. When the magazine was founded, it was virtually the only source of business news in Kansas City. As other media have entered the market with weekly business reports, and the daily newspapers have gotten aggressive about business coverage, we have shifted our focus away from breaking news coverage and company reports to more in-depth/investigative reporting and more focus on the personalities behind businesses."