Here's our first look at the new Vice Magazine redesign, complete with new fonts
It's easy to forget that before the billion-dollar valuations, TV channels and digital omnipresence, Vice started all the way back in 1994 as a humble magazine by the name of Voice of Montreal.
On Wednesday, that magazine reveals its first-ever redesign.
The redesign, which can be seen in the upcoming March issue, has been in the works for a little more than a year, first floated when Ellis Jones took over as editor-in-chief.
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Vice is now best known as an online and broadcast powerhouse, but the magazine still distributes around 1.1 million copies of each issue around the world.
The rethought magazine will center around a return to the publication's counter-culture roots and a cleaner look -- including, design nerds will be happy to hear, fewer and better fonts.
Jones credited Vice's executive design director Matt Schoen for an attention to visual detail that boiled down to even the most minute differences between fonts.
After getting into "the nitty gritty of 15 different font sizes that look the exact same," to her, they settled on Electra and Helvetica Neue.
"I would just stare and him and be like "I don't even know how you see this,'" Jones said, echoing the thoughts of many a magazine editor in the face of their art staff's fervent design obsession around fonts.
Aside from the lettering, the new issue tackles a host of controversies.
The March issue features a profile of comic Hannibal Buress -- best known now for bringing the wrath of an entire society upon Bill Cosby -- a Q&A with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, and a feature on the unexpected refugee crisis caused the anti-gay law in Uganda.
Jones tells Mashable that after her team was in place, they huddled to think about the purpose of the publication.
"What do we want to do with the magazine? what do we want to change? What are we happy with what do we want to do differently?" she said in an interview with Mashable.
The answer came in a bit of a return to Vice's roots.
Vice Magazine was founded with the idea of covering things that were a little counter-culture and weren't really getting any attention. The redesign gets back to those ideas.
"I think we realized everything we were doing was leaning a bit heavily on the news," she said. "We just decided to try to strike a better balance and do more culture."
The structure of the magazine will remain roughly the same, but the most noticeable changes will come at the front of the magazine, Jones said.
The front of the magazine will now feature a section,"Briefs," that will include short, punchy pieces on news and culture, and goes heavy on visuals including illustrations and infographics.
That leads into the magazine's longer-form section for features, photo spreads and fiction, which in magazine speak is known as the "well."
The last section, "Field Notes," will cap everything off with commentary, columns and a look at the making of that issue.
As for the visuals, Jones said she, Schoen and magazine designer Alen Zukanovic had an all-day meeting with a large stack of magazines and plenty of Post-It notes, looking for cues on what they did and didn't want to do.
"We made an internal Bible," of things they liked and things they wanted to avoid, Jones said.
Art directors everywhere will cheer one decision: the hallowed principle of good magazine design, white space, is at the center of the new magazine concept, with spacious borders and a more restrained layout.
"We don't want to put out a magazine that has a whole bunch of graphics or gimmicks," Jones said.
As for the magazine's iconic cover art, don't expect any huge differences. The "Vice" logo will be a bit smaller. The "free" box moves down to the bottom left.
"We'll continue to put out interesting, unique covers that might not be that mainstream," Jones said. "We probably didn't want to change too much for the cover because we think it's something that's iconic."
More pictures below of the upcoming issue are below.
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Jason Abbruzzese is a Business Reporter at Mashable. He covers the media and telecom industries with a particular focus on how the Internet is changing these markets and impacting consumers. Prior to working at Mashable, Jason served as Markets Reporter and Web Producer at the Financial Times. Jason holds a B.S. in Journalism from Boston University and an M.A. in International Affairs from Australian National University.
