Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!oddjob!ncar!ames!oliveb!sun!hburford@enprt.Wichita.NCR.COM
From: hburford@enprt.Wichita.NCR.COM (Harry Burford)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Publish! Page Makeover
Message-ID: <55530@sun.uucp>
Date: 6 Jun 88 19:49:45 GMT
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Distribution: comp
Lines: 48
Approved: desktop-request%plaid@sun.com

|>Publish! magazine has done a complete makeover of itself in the June
|>issue, and asked for comments from it's readers about whether or not
|>they improved things. I think it'd be an interesting discussion here as
|>well as a way of opening up a discussion of design concepts in general.

|>What do you folks think?

I think they made a major step backward rather than forward in their 
redesign.   I got my copy the other day and it sat in the in basket
for quite a while.     Had to search for the title since they went 
with the VERY narrow and TALL cover name.  Yuk!    The old style 
wasn't quite Old English, but you could definitly read it across the
room and you KNEW what magazine it was.   Take a trip to the magazine
store and look at all of them lined up on the rack.    Which one 
gets your attention and makes you want to read it.    For me, its
not the new and improved Publish! layout.

I guess I'm going to have to spend additional time when I go thru mags.
and digest the layout as well as the information in them.    Often, when
I'm in a time crunch, I'll quickly thumb thru a mag reading the high 
points and then saving the details for later.   I really had to work
to figure out what pages were ads and what pages had articles, and 
where those articles started.    I got the impression that the Publish!
folks told their design staff to include as many DTP tricks as they
could in the magazine and not to be conserned with readability.   
For example, how about the article starting on Pg. 70.   Screened box
and art on EVERY page and placed in such a way that a reader has to 
stop reading to find the top of the next column.   To complicate things
further they even did a wrap around on page 75.  The 7 line tall enlarged
first character of each section adds to the confusion.    Really looks
sharp!   I'm going to frame the mag. and hang it on the wall.   Its
by far too hard to read.     

There you have it Chuq.   You wanted to generate feedback.
-- 
Harry Burford - NCR E & M Wichita, Printer Engineering
PHONE:   316-636-8016
FAX:     316-636-8889                 Harry.Burford@Wichita.NCR.COM
C-Serve: 76367,151

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