Mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers are suf­fer­ing, every­where. Every­where? Appar­ently, one of them is doing extremely well: The Econ­o­mist. Michael Hirschorn argues in this arti­cle in The Atlantic that is has to do with their atti­tude, style of writ­ing, care­ful research – in other words qual­ity. In Hirschorn’s words, The Econ­o­mist may be proof for the fact that »although dig­i­tal media is clearly sup­plant­ing every­thing ana­log, dig­i­tal will not nec­es­sar­ily destroy ana­log. A bet­ter word might be dis­place.«.

Hirschorn does not men­tion design, so I’ll have to do that. As I wrote in Jan­u­ary 2007 in this very blog on the occa­sion of the pub­li­ca­tion of ITC Offic­ina Dis­play, I was respon­si­ble for the redesign of The Econ­o­mist in May 2001.

As seen here, we touched every­thing, includ­ing the text face. It was set smaller in the new ver­sion, but the client always thought we’d increased the type size, because it appeared big­ger on the page. The images below show two typ­i­cal spreads, one before, when the news­pa­per was printed black and white with a bit of red only, and one after, when we had gone to full colour. While I am very pleased that our design held up so well, I think that every pub­li­ca­tion needs its design eval­u­ated every six or so years. It’s been eight years already for The Econ­o­mist. Is any­body read­ing my blog in St. James’s Street?