In the 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 make over of Family Circle:

One of the biggest design challenges a consumer magazine -- especially one of the women's service pubs -- faces is visually separating ads from editorial pages, 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. That said, personal experience (HOW's design prior to our redesign in 2005 called for a color-coded, sectioned approach to our columns and departments) tells me that this navigation structure can begin to feel stylistically tired and editorially constraining. But by then, it'll be time for another redesign.

More here.