Maisonneuve redesigned

Thirty issues in, Montreal-based arts and ideas magazine Maisonneuve has unveiled a new look and a new website.

Among the changes are a new, smaller logo (leaving more space for sell lines on the cover), new fonts and a change to the interior page design that is a “conscious move away from newsweekly design elements, in favour of a greater ‘uniqueness’ factor.”

Also, the mag’s tagline “eclectic curiosity” has been changed back to the one used for the first two issues, “arts, opinion and ideas.”

The reason for the tagline change? In his column introducing the redesign, “Welcome to Maisonneuve 2.0“, Derek Webster wrote:

“I’ll let you in on a little secret: no one actually knows what eclectic curiosity means. It’s a redundancy wrapped in an enigma wrapped in bacon. A cute, finger-food phrase—something perky-sounding that may or may not contain real substance, all held together by a wooden toothpick. In my defense, I love bacon, which may explain why we’ve kept it around this long.

But curiosity is, by definition, eclectic. And all magazines are relentlessly eclectic within their field. So saying our magazine is eclectic and curious is like saying—well, if Maisonneuve were a restaurant, it would be like putting ‘Lively Chewing’ on our awning.”