Here at the Weekly, deadlines hit us like a ton of bricks. Bricks with nails sticking out of them. Rusty nails! Dipped in anthrax! By Frenchmen! The days get hectic, is what I'm saying. There's always a rat-scurry of minor details underfoot, none of them life-changing, all of them requiring attention. So you round them up with one hand while manhandling a 10-pound to-do list with the other. And with your third hand, you answer the phone—it's a publicist with an ill-timed pitch, or your youngest son tattling on his brothers. And then your e-mail beeps ...
Deadline, obviously, is no time to redesign a publication. That process calls for long and careful study, the comparing of many alternatives and deep thinking about new ways to solve old problems. So when we decided to skip all that and just redesign the Weekly on deadline (over a couple, actually), our plunge was made easier by knowing—kind of—what we wanted.
We wanted what everyone wants when they redesign—what President Bush wants from a redesign of Iraq, what John Kerry wants from a redesign of the presidency, what the Red Sox want from redesigning Nomar Garciaparra off the team: a fresh start, a new attitude, a competitive edge, a chance to make our little patch of the world reflect the way we see our place in the larger one.
So Art Director Benjamen Purvis and I agreed that he would give us a fresh start, a new attitude, a competitive edge, etc., and, oh, can you do it in a couple of weeks?
No problem.
"I wanted our pages to look much more dynamic, without imposing on the limited time a designer has for layout each week," he says. Now, hang on for some technical graphics verbiage: "I converted us from a four-column page to an eight-column page, so we could introduce things like The Rail in As We See It. And I added some contemporary design elements embraced by national magazines." He monkeyed with the type and the gray scales and the other ingredients of his voodoo to come up with a new look that doesn't so much replace our old design scheme as extend it into a nicer neighborhood.
Content-wise, we've attempted a little jazzing-up. Ben mentioned The Rail—that's a narrow stripe of micro-features on the opening page of As We See It. The lead A&E page is now a snack plate of similar small items—tiny reviews, lists, Anne Kellogg's The Consumer column. Suitable for speed-grazing.
"Now," Ben says, "the pages have more tonality and style, and we should still be able to just miss deadline every week."
See? Everyone wins.