Toronto Life redesign blast from the past

Toronto
Life‘s iconic box logo is back, along with a new cover font, as
part of its August redesign, D.B. Scott reports on his Canadian Magazines blog.

Scott reports that the magazine’s content has also been redesigned to include regular articles from former Globe and Mail columnist Jan Wong, a new culture column and new back page memoir.

On the redesign, Scott writes:

“The magazine moved away from the red box — originally created by Ken Rodmell some 35 years ago — in April, 2005 with a redesign by art director Carol Moskot under the then editor John Macfarlane. This is the design that the current art director Jessica Rose and editor Sarah Fulford have  worked with since.

“The Moskot logo went across the top, with skybars. The new look has a skybar and subsdiary cover lines to the right of the logo, as before. The logotype itself is more angular, less rounded, not at all retro. But the red box is back, only transparent, rather than solid or, as Rose says “way cooler”.
Rose turned to the London design firm A2/SW/HK and noted designer Henrik Kubel to collaborate on a reworking of the letter form of the logo.

“The body face (Farnham) stays the same but with a new, darker cut and leading is much more compressed . As a result, the columns of type seem quite concentrated. The display face is various weights of Bureau Grotesque throughout, including the column headings.”

Scott interviewed Rose on the reasoning behind the redesign. She told Scott: “A large part of this redesign is an homage to classic magazine design, going back to old school ways of dealing with type.” He notes that the pages are more packed with content, and the designers have played with the leading and type size. She told Scott:

“In terms of the contents page, one of the main things is we decided to have a table of contents in order, the order of the magazine, and to have one contents page instead of two. A big goal was, the recession has happened, we used to have 100 pages and we now have an average of 65 pages of edit. How can we make 65 pages as packed as possible? That was the reason for the larger grid. ”