Mark Porter

I’ve just picked up a copy of the redesigned Newsweek.

News magazines are in a lot of trouble, and have fallen a long way since Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report had a combined paid for circulation of 10 million. Like many other types of print media, these titles seem to have lost their place in the modern world; the editor’s letter in this relaunch is another plausible-sounding but rather desperate justification of the role of a historic print franchise in the new media age.

Time’s response was to relaunch in 2007 with a redesign by the ubiquitous Luke Hayman. It was slick and contemporary but very much in the mould of the classic news magazine – a 21st century reimagining of the seminal Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser design from 1977.

Newsweek had its own classic moment with Roger Black’s 1985 design, but this time they have decided to break with tradition. The redesign is by Emily Oberman, a Tibor Kalman alumnus whose best-known editorial project is probably the Conde Nast magalog Lucky.

There may be something I’m missing but it all feels a bit random to me. A random selection of fonts, (Archer, Farnham, Flama I think) deployed randomly on text and display type. Random use of the grid, random image sizes and positions. You might imagine that high resolution photography is one advantage that a printed news mag still has over the internet, but pictures here are often hacked into corners, with type overprinted. This random feel also makes it genuinely difficult to tell the ads from the editorial in some places, and one of the stronger ideas (full bleed right-hand openers to the four major sections) really suffers from this.

It’s certainly a break from normal news magazine practice which may be a good thing. But it doesn’t feel really new. The cover, which is probably the most dramatic element in the whole project, is very Tiboresque.

I had resolved not to be so critical of other people’s work here in future, as it always looks worse written down and can seem harsher than I meant. But blogs are about opinions, and I have to say that (IMHO of course) this redesign is pretty disastrous. I really hope that a massive circulation boost proves me wrong, as news magazines need all the help they can get. But I’m not holding my breath.

The site has changed too — I haven’t had a chance to dig down into that yet, may post something on it later