Fifty issues, one grid

The problem

Aplomb has published four issues a year since 2011. It has been redesigned five times, each time by a different person, each time from scratch. Nothing in the archive shared a measure, a type size or a caption style, which made a fifty issue collection look like fifty magazines.

Inside the office, the cost was worse than the look. Laying out an article took a full day because every decision was open every time: how wide, which weight, where the credits go, what a full page image does to the running head.

What we did

One grid, six columns, that holds every article the review has ever published and every kind it says it might publish next: the long interview, the photo essay, the technical drawing spread, the two page book review.

Two typefaces, a serif for text and a grotesque for everything that is not text, with the sizes fixed rather than chosen. Captions have one place. Credits have one place. A full page image has one behaviour, described in a sentence rather than in a meeting.

We laid out three issues ourselves before handing over, which is how the rules that do not work get found. Eleven rules were changed during those three issues; four were deleted for being decoration.

What it changed

A standard article now takes about three hours to lay out. The editorial team applied the grid retroactively to the fifty issue archive for the web version, which was not part of the brief and is the best thing that came out of it.

The review gained around twelve hundred subscribers in the year after the redesign. We take no credit for that: the editor changed the commissioning policy the same season.