SI redesign

Nothing new here. Red and black have quickly become shopworn magazine redesign cliches over the past 10 years thanks to consultant Roger Black.

 

Think they are trying to create a more readable version of ESPN

 

not sure what all the gnashing of teeth is about. i think it looks good -- more like the atlantic. the long excerpt from 20 years ago makes no sense to me: isn't journalism, "NEWS", about the now? but aside from that, i'm in.

 

Seems to me like the extra 'leading off' photo and the vault stuff are filler -- that's one less story they've got to pay somebody to produce each week, without shrinking the magazine.

As for the look of it, I'm OK with it. I think it was fine and better as it was before, but this change in style is only a minor downgrade, IMO. Over time I think we'll adjust to the look and it won't be a big deal.

 

I literally can't read. It hurts my eyes. Something to do with the more condensed type, but greater leding.... and the mixing of san serif typeface.

 

I was all set to defend SI a bit, since I don't find the redesign to be particularly bothersome, but then I got to the end and found that most of the SI Vault story is missing from my issue. There's a photo of Darryl Dawkins with the headline THE VAULT, and judging from the cutline I'm guessing the facing page was supposed to be the other half of the photo with Dave Cowens, but that's not there. And there is no accompanying story. So all I have is a random picture of Darryl Dawkins.

C'mon SI. Be better than that.

 

My first reaction Thursday after flipping through the redesign, like many of you, was that the fourth Leading Off spread coupled with The Vault is four pages of content that can be filled rather quickly and at a lesser expense (if I recally reading the cutlines correctly, only two of the four Leading Off spreads were staff photographs, while two others were from the wires).

What is more disappointing, though, is the apparent decrease in the number of features. There were four legitimate features this week -- Southern California linebackers, Ken Griffey Jr., NBA foul calls and Roger Clemens -- rather than the five or six that have appeared regularly since the page decrease a year or two ago. (I do not include the NFL Draft preview among the features because it is designed for 20-second readers, not 20-minute readers). Those four features contained 16 pages of text, only 12 from magazine staff writers. That just about floored me. What remains is good, but there is so little of it. I read every issue cover to cover, but this one took me only 1 hour, 52 minutes. Sad.

(For those who care, a breakdown of the page content is as follows ...

74 pages
51 pages of magazine content
37 pages of magazine text [that includes the four-page gatefold and The Vault]
24.33 pages of advertisements.)

 

The redesign wouldn't bother me so much, if the font weren't so light ... and the printing was decent so I could actually read the content. There about seven pages that I can read.

 

I don't really care about any of the above.
But what bothers me is the Diesel ad makes the whole damn magazine smell like Raid.

 

After going through it, my biggest beef is The Vault feature. Why not pull something they've done in the past on the NFL Draft or something that adds context to something else in the Mag. An early story on Griffey, a fawning piece on Clemens. Though I admit if you're going to hack them up to get them to fit a space, you'd be better off just bagging the feature and maybe use it for a generic "Best of SI.com" from the week before.

 

Channeling Orange Hat Bobcat, I dug up last year's SI for the corresponding week (4/28/08). The comparison:
Issue - 4/28/08 - 4/27/09
Pages - 86 - 74
Golf + - 24 - 12
Ad pages - 38.17 - 23.33 (not including a house ad OHB may have counted, and other house ads this year)
Golf + ad pages - 14 - 5.5
Major stories - 5 - 4 (counting all NFL draft coverage as one story)
NFL draft pages - 12 - 10

In other words and numbers, less of everything. In newspapers, magazines, radio, TV and the net, ads pay the freight.

 

I've bought this for my dad the several couple years. My dad's been reading SI for decades. I used to rush home from school to get it out of the mailbox and read it before he got home from work.

This year, he told me I could let it lapse.

Telling.