The 151-year old American magazine The Atlantic just had a redesign. Since that very magazine employs quite a few political bloggers that I read every day, and since their posts tend to be peppered with links to new Atlantic ad campaigns and various articles, including some about the redesign, I couldn’t escape it.

I love seeing how magazines are put together. We get the issue and it seems as though it’s always existed, that the typesetting and layout has never really changed, just because of the combined weight of all the issues before it. So when a magazine (even one I don’t read on paper like The Atlantic) changes its design and shows us exactly how it was done, I’m fascinated.

Instead of just a simple layout refresh, the magazine went all out and hired Pentagram for the design and Havas (well, a subsidiary of international agency Havas) for some eye-catching promotional work.

What I love about seeing this process is that we get some rejected design ideas. While I initially thought the new cover was a bit too busy (it looks like a wordle diagram), future issues will feature photography, and the idea of the first one was to push the flow of ideas that emenate from the magazine’s writers. Look at the rejected idea on the left: although I like the design, I think it’s too backward looking and sits in the realm of “we are a prestigious magazine”, which is a design I believe the Atlantic’s editors were trying to escape from. The New Yorker’s already got that aesthetic side of the market sewn up. Plus the design on the right seems a touch too contemporary–there’s no acknowledgement whatsoever of the “timelessness” of the Atlantic Brand. Here’s lead graphic designer Michael Bierut:

The Atlantic, we discovered, demands a careful balance between intellectual engagement and entertainment. In a magazine of ideas, writers depend on words to build their arguments, but we didn’t want The Atlantic’s pages to look like homework. Nor did we want to diminish the gravitas that its subjects demand by larding the book with graphic tricks that could be rightly dismissed as eye candy.

One of the main examples is this site here, called Think Again, which is (sort of) also called The Atlantic Project. It contains a series of great photography–neon signs that ask specific questions, which then open up to show a video, a blog post full of comments, and of course, a relevant Atlantic article that generated the idea.

Some innovative ideas were brought to the marketing, as well: The Atlantic is advertising on an entirely new surface: muffin tops. They’re also planning restaurant menus and drugstore shampoo shelves. The point is to reach people where they “eat, buy takeout food, and shop,” which is “where people’s brains are most at rest.” The idea is to create a jolt: small and subtle advertising about “big ideas” where you’d least expect it.

[udpated: the winners have been chosen.]

Here’s a piece of information that comes solely from what I’ve noticed, free of any research to back it up: the magazine industry doesn’t seem to be in crisis. I don’t see articles lamenting the inevitable and rapidly approaching destruction of the format with anywhere near the frequency of those charting the end of the Newspaper, for example. Maybe I’m wrong, but magazines still seem pretty healthy, even though I barely buy them. They’re a tricky thing for me–I have subscriptions to exactly two of them, and I don’t read as many as I probably should online, considering the amount of great long journalism still being done. The only time I hit upon some great writing that I take time out to read is usually when it gets mentioned by say, 3 blogs I happen to read, all at once.

The modern newsstand is a mixed bag, and I think that’s my main problem. There are so many magazines out there, and they’re all so glossy and full of attention-grabbing headlines that I can scarcely take it all in. I don’t really know where the industry is at anymore, if I ever did. It’s too bad, because magazines are also an invaluable design resource–the best of them have some extremely fine graphic artists working for them, doing work that a lot of us just don’t see. In this vein, the American Society of Magazine Editors have recently announced their finalists for the 2008 magazine Cover of the Year (the ASME holds a separate contest for excellency in magazine covers, different from its well-known National Magazine Awards, which are handed out later and are eventually followed by an annual, indispensible compilation-book that makes me feel OK about not buying any of the individual issues).

Let’s check out some of this year’s finalists, specifically the three running for the final Cover of the Year:

Here we’ve got Interview Magazine celebrating their founder–Andy Warhol–in this 80th Birthday issue, which has some striking photography of designer Marc Jacobs on the cover. It’s a great photograph, but a top 3 finalist? There are a few covers that didn’t make it which really could have (speaking of which, why is the art department of Texas Monthly so good?). Back in May, Glenn O’Brien, Interview’s recently installed editor, talked about the shoot to New York magazine:

“I don’t know if that’s Andy’s wig on his head in the shot, but I talked to the guy at the Warhol Museum yesterday, and he was complaining about makeup being on Andy’s wig, so I guess they did use it.”

Speaking of New York , they’re one of the other finalists: their March 24 cover features a fine, polite portrait of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer sabotaged by a good and direct piece of design. I think ruminating over that cover for 5 minutes is probably more rewarding than reading most of the overheated scandal-analyses from the period.

The final cover comes from David Remnick’s New Yorker, and is by the same artist–Barry Blitt–who produced the infamous Obama cover of this summer. It depicts Iran’s presdient, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, getting a taste of the bathroom-stall stance made famous by Senator Larry Craig’s unintentionally hilarious defense (that he was sitting in a wide stance), back when he was arrested for soliciting sex in a public bathroom. Some context: at the time of the cover, Ahmadinejad had also made the possibly-difficult-to-verify claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

My vote goes for New York’s Spitzer cover: concise and smart, it made fast use of a perfectly captured studio photograph (you really couldn’t hope for anything more earnest) to create a lasting image-cum-summary of the scandal.