I had a glorious moment regarding the power of successful design yesterday.  It’s something I’ve known about – even used as a pithy aphorism when talking up my own work and the work of others – and know I’ve experienced, but could not point to a specific incident.  And lo!  Such a moment has come upon me and I caught it.  It has to do with this simple phrase: people do not know what good design is, but they will respond to it – meaning that what makes a design strong is some kind of underlying purpose or structure that is not necessarily apparent to the audience.

The moment is simply this: the magazine The Atlantic was redesigned.  The redesign was spearheaded by design heavyweight Michael Beirut and his cronies at Pentagram.  And I found myself reading the magazine.

I know – it sounds ridiculous.  But I have subscribed to The Atlantic for over a year now, and I’ve bought copies of it off the newsstand in the past.  Prior to this issue, I’ve skimmed articles, cherry-picked things to read, stared at the cover, positioned it prominently in my home when guests are scheduled to arrive, etc., but I cannot honestly say that I’ve delved into the thing with any kind of commitment.

This newly redesigned issue?  I’m halfway through it and it arrived three days ago.  I can’t put it down.  And it was this that hit me, just yesterday.  The content of the magazine has not changed; it’s presentation has.  That’s what’s different, and it’s finally made me into The Atlantic reader that I’ve pretended to be for a good while now.

Beirut writes a short but sweet article about the redesign, and has this to say about it:

Unlike a logo or a poster, the design of which can rely on blunt simplicity, a magazine is a complex organism, the result of an intricate interplay if words and pictures.  Any single issue represents thousands of minute desicions about typography, layout, photography, and illustration.

Clearly there was something in the previous iteration of this complex organism that was making it impenetrable to me.  Yet Beirut and his team found a way to invite me into it.  What was it? Choice of typeface?  Column width?  Kerning?  Hard to say.  Again, I’m not sure what the change was that opened the door; I’d be hard pressed to find it even if I sat down and looked for it.  And I’m not sure I want to find it.

This experience, however, has galvanized my faith in good design.  So frequently the choices we make on a daily basis – fretting over typeface, minute adjustments to leading, color color color – go seemingly unnoticed.  Our work gets released to the public, and the significance of that extra 5 clicks of cyan that you inserted into the background and sweated over for 2 hours seems like a huge waste of time, because nobody notices.  But if this little experience with The Atlantic has taught me anything, it’s this: they notice. On some level, that information is getting across; that extra care and attention you put into your work does indeed make it to the public

Take heart colleagues!  Design is not dead.

Much more to say, soon, about the experience as complex organism.  I think Beirut is dead-on when he refers to the magazine as an organism; I think that analogy applies to a surprising amount of design challenges.  More later.