EDITORS' NOTE: This is our second installment of Designing Editors, a monthly feature in which design experts critique media design. This month, Bryn Mooth, editor in chief of HOW magazine, tackles the makeover of Family Circle.

COVER
In my view, a cover re-do that takes a softer color palette, a restrained approach to typography and less-manic coverlines is an improvement -- although inevitably, newsstand sales figures will tell the story of any magazine's redesign. Comparing May 2005 and May 2006 issues, the new look features an attractively styled cover shot in a warmer, softer color scheme. We've gone from 10 coverlines to five, and ditched the exclamatory bar at the top of the cover ("WIN a Family Vacation!"). As an editor whose team wrestles with coverlines for every issue, I can appreciate Family Circle's restraint, though the old format marched in lockstep with the so-called "rules" of magazine cover design: hard-sell coverlines, and a lot of them, especially for magazines that depend on newsstand -- or supermarket -- sales.

FC's new navigation system is "an effective design solution."

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS
One of the biggest design challenges a consumer magazine -- especially one of the women's service pubs -- faces is visually separating ads from editorialpages, especially in the columns and departments, where most of the ad pages live. Photos of exquisitely styled food or smiling, well-scrubbed moms and kids -- is it an ad, or is it editorial? The lines often blur. (Seriously, the ad for Ashton-Drake Galleries' hyper-realistic newborn-baby doll is WAY disturbing.) One way that FC has tackled this problem is by introducing a sort of wayfinding system to help the reader navigate through the front-of-book sections. Color-coded and tagged with labels like "Home" or "Family," the system relies on a trio of half-circles in the upper outside corner of each edit page. It's an effective design solution, and one that FC's PR rep Marissa Ollins says was in response to reader request.

Beyond this new graphic element, column pages have been opened up; Lizzul's team broke with the prior format's over-reliance on rule lines and chunky colored boxes, opting instead for full-page photography and a more flexible layout. Variation in body typefaces helps separate discrete blocks of text; it's an effective solution.

Say hello to full-page photos and a more flexible layout.

FEATURES
Feature articles may be longer and more in-depth than columns, but they're visually indistinguishable. As the editor of a mag with a very distinct line between the two types of content, I initially found this confusing; as an FC reader, however, I think I'd appreciate that every article follows the same color-coding and labeling and that all like articles are grouped together, so I can easily flip to the section I'm most interested in.

OVERALL
While I'm not a reader of women's magazines in general, I'd rate Family Circle's new 'do as both aesthetically appealing and functionally effective. It retains the same jam-packed feel that it had before (and that competitors share), with lots of information, presented in easily digestible chunks. But simple tweaks -- losing the keylines, opting for bigger photos, adding the navigation graphics -- make the magazine feel less manic.

No doubt what busy moms really need.

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.