Bold Changes at EW

With its 1001st issue, Entertainment Weekly unveiled a redesign of the entire magazine. I am not a foe of redesigns. Time’s for instance, has drawn all manner of ridicule, but I think it’s really good—it’s clean-looking (thank you, The Economist!), and it’s already shown that it can withstand the loss of ideas that don’t work, like that photo timeline on the opening spread, which teased stories that didn’t appear in the magazine. Hopefully, soon its Wiki-style flexibility will allow the loss of the shockingly predictable Pop Chart.

EW’s redesign, though, looks cheap. There’s an opening spread that looks like it wandered over from OK!, and I don’t think Sound Bites has been improved by floating the funny quotes comic-book-style, above photos of their speakers’ heads, but the real bummer is the way every article contains a boldface phrase. It’s extremely distracting. Maybe the point is to make it easier for publicists to find blurb gold like “absolutely marvelous,” but I suspect it’s born of a misguided attempt to make EW’s articles, which aren’t that long anyway, look more bloggy.

Curiously, the online versions of the reviews omit the goofy formatting. Stick with those for now.

Tags: Design, Entertainment Weekly, EW, magazines

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