Sound Off on the New, Greener Geist

The move to friend­lier paper and inks is great — I like the feel and look of the paper-ink combo and the cov­er­ish­ness of the cover stock.

I am rather taken by the whim­si­cal illus­tra­tion on the cover — it is under­stated, and muted — but do won­der if would be more suited as an inside art work? And it seems so literal-minded. I have come to expect and look for­ward to enig­matic and arrest­ing pho­to­graphic art on the cov­ers, which often seemed sly trib­utes to Mandelbrot’s inter­ests (at least I thought — maybe I’m wrong).

I am slightly less enam­ored of the design redo. Don’t par­tic­u­larly care for the cut-off “T” on the cover. As some­one else noted, there is a retro look to the whole thing — I dare­say even an old-timey look, meant to per­haps recall poster­age of the late Victorian or Edwardian age (for­give me, I am not a design his­to­rian, but that seems like the time-frame)? At any rate, methinks it is a bit too type-heavy, unruly, and self-conscious all at the same time. And what’s with the lower-case “the obama dreams”?

And I detect sub­tle changes on the inside too — it is early in the morn­ing, and I have a sore knee lig­a­ment, so I am not going to get up and go to the shelf to find an old issue to com­pare, but I seem to espe­cially notice a dif­fer­ence in the Notes & Dispatches and Findings sec­tions — some­thing about rules, columns, maybe head­line type, and lay­outs. At any rate, I found that as I moved though the mag, I was less sure of where I was; where did one sec­tion end and another begin? The N&D bits seemed less note-y and more article-y. The Findings seemed to be miss­ing those mar­ginal inter­ven­tions of lists and doo­dles — of marginalia.

So those are my thoughts.