Designing Editors: Jane

EDITORS' NOTE: Welcome to our new "Designing Editors" feature. Every month, we'll be asking designers and design editors for their take on media design. They'll take a look at how well the publication (or TV show, or ad campaign or …) does what it's supposed to, stays on message visually and appeals to its audience.

This month, design editors Julie Lasky of I.D., Bryn Mooth of HOW and Joyce Rutter Kaye of Print tell us what they think of Jane magazine's new look, unveiled for its March issue.

Julie Lasky, editor-in-chief, I.D. magazine

I first realized Jane’s redesign was a triumph when I was reading an issue in a bar. The 35-ish man next to me picked up the other copy and became engrossed in it. There we sat, side by side, two strangers, neither of whom was a woman in her twenties, drinking in stories such as “Major Shoegasm,” “Legs Up to Here,” and “The Best and Worst of Being Ashlee.”

The Belucian typeface has some Frederick’s of Hollywood flourishes, such as bulbous serifs and very big ascenders.

The dollar sign is brutish.

If it were just about the headlines, we would have reached for the breadsticks, but well-photographed, artfully styled pages held us rapt. Jane never lacked for a spirited point of view, but now the design is almost as bracing. The cropped cover portraits zoom readers face to face with celebrities. And just as the cover lines are splashier and edgier (both March’s and April’s offer some permutation of “Sex” “$” and “Trick”), the Belucian typeface in which many are set has some Frederick’s of Hollywood flourishes, such as bulbous serifs and very big ascenders (for instance, the vertical lines in the lowercase “k,” “f,” and “b”).

This decorative quality manages to be both feminine and invigorating. Too bad the font isn’t drawn better — the lowercase “g” winnows away at the base like badly pulled taffy, and the dollar sign is brutish. Inside, one finds acts of relative audacity, such as an all-type feature in April called “69 great things about being in your 20s (plus 7 that really suck).” One wishes, here and elsewhere, for a more adroit mixing of serif and sans-serif fonts — hell, for more refined typography period.

But though the design can be messy, it’s packed with genuine energy.

Inside, one finds acts of relative audacity, such as an all-type feature.

It looks as if the design team reduced the point size of the body text and increased the leading, which makes feature pages less visually dense, and added bold color.

Bryn Mooth, editor, HOW magazine

I have to give Paul Ritter, Jane’s design director, credit for breaking the cover mold for the typical young-women’ s-service-slash-celebrity-style magazine; the full-bleed intense closeup photo makes quite a statement. For a magazine that puts readers on a first-name basis with its contributors and sources, it’s appropriately engaging. And it’s a needed departure from Jane’s old cover style, which had young celebs in 2/3-body shots, posed in inconsistent settings and styles. The logo added subtle heft, which gives it a bit more impact; there are fewer coverlines (phew!) and a focused color palette. The cover typefaces work well together: the fat, serif Belucian stands out, and Akzidenz Grotesk is a well-matched companion.

Inside pages show a number of improvements, as well. Previously, text and images weren’t as well integrated and there were problems with hierarchy (blocks of text were similarly sized and weighted, and text-heavy pages were dull and gray). It looks as if the design team reduced the point size of the body text and increased the leading, which makes feature pages less visually dense, and added bold color. The front-of-book departments have this cut-out-photo-collagey thing going on (and text boxes that look like angular speech bubbles) — it’s cute and girly, but doesn’t seem to reflect that Jane speaks to twentysomethings, not teenyboppers. But hey, I’m not the target audience. Overall (in Janespeak), I’m, like, lovin’ the new look — Jane’s my new BFF.

Joyce Rutter Kaye, editor-in-chief, Print

Cover: I like the immediacy and personalization of the close-up shot, but I worry about its limitations — there are only so many ways hair can be arranged to whip artfully across a face and fill background space before the format gets old. I also believe celebrity recognition diminishes at this level; if you can’t make out the crook in Ashlee Simpson’s nose right away, you won’t know it’s her without the coverline cue.

The serif cover type, Belucian, also suffers when pushed to extremes. At this heavy weight, the huge contrast between the face’s thick and thin lines obliterates any of its 1920s Gatsbyesque elegance — its wild swings between fat and skinny make it the typographic equivalent of Tobey Maguire. Its overly mannered aggressiveness seems more a self-conscious attempt to shout “new editor on board!” and “big new redesign!” than is necessary.

The front-of-book departments have this cut-out-photo-collagey thing going on (and text boxes that look like angular speech bubbles).

The photography, though, is where Jane shines.

Inside: the lighter weight of the typeface does give the magazine added punch, but the redesign’s reliance (as with most women’s mags) on the bits-and pieces approach to content gives me the jitters. Rectangular speech panels are used again and again for callouts, headlines, sidenotes — entire Q&As, for that matter. Articles are broken up into patchy text boxes (or round sticker-bubbles) for quick skimming. And just two issues into the redesign, the feature layouts already default to formula: opening page/spread with large head/intro text dropped out of a solid-colored background and little or no interplay with accompanying visuals.

The photography, though, is where Jane shines — once the text is out of the way, there’s good stuff: a sexy Bettie-Page inspired fashion spread recreating a romp in a midcentury boudoir; a portrait series of 45 women under 30 by an unexpectedly eclectic range of shooters including Martin Parr, Larry Fink, Gillian Laub and Bryan Adams. Elsewhere in the book, ample candid shots lend a timely touch, but set as they are within the frenetic patchwork format leaves me wanting to sink my teeth into something more substantial — like, you know, a nice plateful of Belucian.

Julie Lasky is editor in chief of I.D. magazine. She is the author of Some People Can't Surf: The Graphic Design Of Art Chantry (Chronicle Books).

Bryn Mooth, editor of HOW, has been there nearly 15 years, both as a staff editor and contributing writer. She has also written about interior design and fine art for various consumer and trade publications.

Joyce Rutter Kaye is editor in chief of Print, the bimonthly magazine about graphic design and visual culture. In 2005, Print won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (100,000 circulation and below).