When we decided in early 2024 that the time was right to get serious about redesigning the print magazine and logo, we set out to find the right partners to work with. After a search for someone with unparalleled design chops who understood the particular rigors of producing a weekly magazine and also had some familiarity with the book world, we found our unicorn: Heather Haggerty. She’s worked at, among other places, the New York Times (including for the NYTBR), Rachael Ray Every Day, and Entertainment Weekly. She dove in, prowling the PW archives and bringing a singular vision to the project. The look, she determined, would be “bookish but not old.”

While Heather worked with the PW team on page- and section-level designs, she enlisted the help of type designer Tal Leming to reimagine the logo and badge. Tal’s client list is likewise a murderer’s row of brands: GQ, National Geographic, and Wired among them. Between the two of them, we landed on a new look that takes inspiration from PW’s heritage but is also contemporary and forward-looking.

So for our redesign launch issue, we thought, who better to chat with Heather and Tal about their work than Michael Coffey, our former co-editorial director, who in his 26 years at PW worked on several redesigns himself? Here’s the inside story on how it came together.

Bringing in BRAND HISTORY

MC: Heather, tell us about some of your research.

HH: I looked at the editors’ letters that accompanied the various redesigns when they debuted. There was Frederic Goudy and George Maas and also a man named W.A. Dwiggins who popped up. There are so many important people involved historically with the magazine.

TL: Dwiggins is credited with coining the term “graphic design”!

HH: So I’ll be honest, even though this design looks new, it’s actually old, based on precedent. For example, Minion, the body text typeface we used, was used in the 1990s redesign by Dan McDonald—for “a clean, contemporary look.”

The FLEURON Returns

MC: I see the fleuron has been resurrected. How did that come about?

TL: Fascinating to me as a type guy was the fact that one of the early fleurons was designed by Goudy, who is a legendary type designer. His [from 1919] was a bit too of its time to be brought forward as is, so what I tried to do was create something that felt bookish, but not old, to show that this is a mature publication without it looking dated.

What was interesting was that the complete 1967 redesign by Maas, including another entirely new nameplate, featured a fleuron that stayed with the magazine until the 1978 redesign. And I found that the 1967 George Maas redesign had actually used Goudy’s fleuron.

So that made me feel like, okay, in 1967 they wanted to have a nod back, then we have to do the same thing. I will say that the fleuron we used here is not Goudy’s, but it’s not not Goudy’s either. It’s a 21st-century interpretation of his fleuron.

A new Look

MC: What you’ve done strikes me as audacious and classic at the same time.

TL: This weekly has been around for a long, long time, and I’ve done a lot of nameplates for magazines, and I’ve done a lot of brand work. For PW, I sought to keep a continuity with history. We are not trying to show up and say, “Hey, we’re a brand-new thing”; we are trying to show up and say, “We’ve been around a long time, we know what we’re doing. You can trust us.”

Heather and I wanted to give PW a suite of things to work with, rather than to say, “Here’s your logo. Always use this in this color in this size” and so on. Heather pointed out that the logos PW was using in the ’60s and ’70s had their variations. On a computer, it’s really easy to just take the same vector art and squeeze it down this and down that. But there’s something that I think is kind of lost in that, especially for a publication that’s been around for so long and that has so much depth to it.

big, bold typography

MC: Let’s talk about the awesome drop caps you are using in this new design.

HH: Of all the magazines that I loved throughout my youth, one of them has always been National Geographic, and there aren’t a whole lot of magazines that have such long histories like PW—National Geographic, the Atlantic, Scientific American, Vanity Fair. I noticed five
or six years ago that National Geographic was using this insane big typography. I was talking to Tal about it, and he says, “Oh, that’s mine.”

MC: Is there a name for that particular face?

TL: Smoosh! For those times you want or need something giant on the page that looks like art.

HH: You have amazing writers who come up with really good headlines. Type can be art. So that was actually one of the bases of the redesign.

TL: Everything, every incarnation of the flow of text and image, doesn’t have to match. Some things that work on Instagram don’t work here, or there. I don’t think the Smoosh is going to pop up on PW’s website or on Instagram.