It's not academic

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 1996 by Chris Beam

Lingua Franca is not your typical ivory-tower journal, so there's no reason it should look like one. That's the thinking behind the February redesign of the smart, sassy and irreverent magazine that editor and founder Jeffrey Kittay says was starting to look too mainstream. Kittay wanted the design of New York City-based Lingua Franca to reflect the wit and dynamism of editorial that investigates and pokes fun at academic issues, while retaining a classic, consistent look. A tall order, but one that intrigued designer Paul Ritter, former art director of Benetton's visually driven, wildly kaleidoscopic Colors. In contrast, the six-year-old Lingua Franca is full of words and cerebral jokes (80 percent of its readers are professors or graduate students), and offers severely limited color options. "It was interesting being in a world I wasn't used to--academia. There are so many words!" laughs Ritter. "I was excited about doing something text-heavy and two-color."

To create an environment that is at once fun-loving and professorial, Ritter designed using whole words or word sets, enlarged and made bold on the page, to give a turn-of-the-century poster feel. The art mirrors this sensibility, as it primarily comprises old-style metal or woodcuts--but with a twist. For example, an apple that is bouncing off the head of a philosopher on the issue's cover continues to bounce haphazardly through the text of the corresponding story inside. This playful style is harnessed by consistent, even columns of text with few wraparounds and straightforward callouts. Fonts have been streamlined; Lingua Franca formerly used multiple faces but now applies only two: Aksidenz Grotesque for headlines and Galliard for body copy.

"Our audience is made up of scholars, so something old-looking has an appeal and a charge to it, as long as it's sharp," says Kittay. Fifty-eight percent of the readers are male, and the median age is 44. The previous Lingua Franca was more scattered in its design. Each feature was conceived as a single entity with an individual layout and its own varied art. Kittay says this style was too uneven, too desktop publishing," and he wanted the pages to be consistent enough to "have someone look over my shoulder and know I'm reading Lingua Franci." To accomplish this, kitter justified all headlines and made all text columns fit into a consistent grid layout. "In the past year it was so hard to read, and nobody could figure out where they were," recalls Ritter.

The cover, too, say Ritter and Kittay, was in need of a distinctive identity. For the last few years, the magazine had begun to blend in with other titles on the newsstand--a problem Kittay attributes to the four-color capability that became available on the cover when the magazine landed the Absolut account for the back page. While this capability allowed for a diverse range of photographs and illustrations, Lingua Franca covers were suddenly in full color like everything else on the stands. To achieve a recognizable look, Ritter decided touse colors that are dose in tone, rather than bright and varied hues, and to box the cover image with a border. Each bimonthly cover will feature a woodcut and be assigned a specific color to characterize the issue. For example, February's cover contains brown, yellow and rust--colors that are carried throughout the book. Also, the normally discreet barcode has been moved up next to the logo. "The barcode is a heavy industrial corporate thing that toughens up Lingua Franca and gives it an attitude," Ritter explains.

Ritter says these changes increase LF's newsstand viability. Still, he stresses, the new look wasn't created just to sell copies. "There is a style to this profession and a color to academic life," says Kittay. "There are dynamic ways to talk about medieval texts, and the design should reflect that."