Photolog
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Rethink different.
2007 March 12
Waiting in my mailbox was the April issue of Macworld. The cover didn’t feel particularly inspired with its yellow background, nonetheless I flipped to the back page to read “Hot Stuff” for fun tips and items of interest. Instead of finding my fun tips and items of interest, I was greeted with a mug of the magazine’s featured columnist du mois and a layout design that reeks of the 1990s.
I smelled me a magazine design, the scent quite pungent.
From the editor’s column, Jason Snell elaborated:
Yes, we’ve redesigned Macworld. But if you didn’t notice at first [are you kidding me?], don’t feel bad: We’ve tried to be subtle about it. [Subtle? Three words: Tammy Faye Bakker] Our art director Rob Schultz has been with Macworld for more than two years now [and did a great job up until the April issue], and so he knows what worked–and what didn’t–in our previous design [what, not enough ad space?]. Our goal was to maximize those strengths [read: create new ad space] and minimize the weaknesses [read: throw up all over design that was more solid than this]. Also, over the past couple of years, we’ve made a bunch of tweaks and additions [read: ad space] here and there to the content of Macworld. The previous design was straining under those incremental changes, so we wanted to bring them all together as a coherent whole [by throwing rounded corners all over photos from high school yearbooks].
“Hot Stuff” is now at the end of “Mac Beat”, which of course means having to flip through the magazine to find the fun gems instead of turning to the last page and getting exactly what you want. The choice to make users look for what they want—isn’t this what Apple works so hard to avoid in its user experience?
It’s enough to make you want to gang up on a carrot. Or something.