The hard-core news magazine Newsweek is getting a makeover. The question is, will this attract or detract readers? The former founder of such magazines as Saveur, Metropolitan Home and Garden Design is now taking over the aesthetics of Newsweek. Dorothy Kalins will be in charge of making wide-spread changes of the magazine's look, something that reportedly has been left on the backburner while other priorities beckoned at a weekly magazine.
Kalins not only brings an outsider's perspective to the mix, but also the skills to put a magazine together from scratch. But the question is, will readers go for it? These same readers had a hard time when Ronald Reagan decided to change the part in his hair during his presidency. What will happen when faced with not only a change in the title's font, but also the layout of the entire magazine? If Newsweek takes a page out of anyone's book on how to change a magazine, it should look at People. It prescribed to a gradual change for the magazine, beginning with designing new fonts for the magazine's different sections and then gradually working up to messing around with the cover's format. When all was said and done, most consumers didn't even know the changes had taken place. And that, my friends, is the definition of magazine design success.
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