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.

Artist Philip Toledano has launched America: The Gift Shop, an online installation that “reflects the current foreign policy in the fun-house mirror of American commerce. We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?”

I was a little nervous when first clicking on this one: it’s really easy to screw this stuff up, to let art surrender its power to simple ideology or sloganeering. It’s especially easy when your subject isn’t something with a lot of room for nuance. If this was a piece on how “personal circumstance affects the political”, I wouldn’t be hesitant, because that’s a topic with some weight behind it, one that demands a subtle approach.

Subtlety is necessary because pointing out just how things have gone wrong outside America’s borders since 2001 has been done by many many people, and it’s a double-edged sword: the problems are big, and thus easy to refer to in a slogan, but the sheer quantity of them means the clarity of the message can get lost in the explanation. And that’s just the political aspect of it. Trying to turn that kind of criticism into art? It’s a tall order.

That’s why I really like Toledano’s approach, which highlights his strange souvenir-based approach without sliding into lazy criticism of commercial culture. No blustery text about the ‘blind consumerism’ of America and its tenuous connection to foreign policy: he simply says “my palette is the vernacular of retail. The more familiar it is, the better host it becomes for the idea.”

In other words, this isn’t a critique of the foreign policy itself, but a comment on how the most famous aspects of that policy (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Shock & Awe) were digested and normalized by the public until they resembled familiar figures on a store shelf somewhere. Works for me–I know my repeated exposure to the hooded & wired Abu Ghraib figure has certainly dulled whatever my initial reaction was to it, and now that deadening process has been mapped out through visual art, getting me to think about the original image all over again.

And here’s another election-period piece of art/comedy for you, just ’cause: A New Electoral Map by Chris Harris and Stephanie Chen.

Famed magazine editor Tina Brown has launched The Daily Beast, a new aggregator, blog, and news website. Falling into the niche popularized by The Huffington Post but less partisan, the site aims to be a one-stop source for several things: politics, media news, gossip, photography, and various hand-picked links to other sites.

Using the slogan “read this skip that”, the main draw is the caliber of the site’s contributors, and its large and well-read staff, who carefully select and distill the day’s must-read stories.

The site is divided into a few key categories: “Cheat Sheet” is a kind of RSS feed reader in miniature, pulling together the top 15-or-so stories worth clicking through to. There’s a useful, flashy “xtra insight” section on the side which adds more context to each story (often a youtube link).

Then there’s the “Big Fat Story“, which is presumably something the editors believe will dominate that day’s news cycle. The Daily Beast uses a reasonably clear system to lay out various opinions on said issue of the day, complete with a mouse-over preview that lets you read a sufficient amount without being overloaded by the text of six articles all at once.

There’s also the “Buzz Board“, which is where the connections and cash of Brown (and Barry Diller, the site’s backer) make themselves known. These are big-name, small-blog contributions from people like Arianna Huffington, Christiane Amanpour, and Bill Clinton, and besides the storied reputation of Brown herself, are what’s drawing most of the site’s hype this week.

By default, this corner of the page is the most interesting. Initially I thought it was annoying that these big-name figures had only a micro-blog format with which to contribute, but now I’m thinking it’s ideal. I definitely don’t need to read a full article by, say, Eric Idle, and Bill Clinton’s prose isn’t something I need to digest at length, either. His three economy-related book recommendations are just fine.

There’s no question Brown is a talented curator of talent, but her unashamed attention to celebrity can still be slightly jarring. When cover stories about Jennifer Lopez’s potential nervous breakdown–6 years ago–are put right next to some serious work on the financial crisis, something seems off. But this is Brown’s modus operandi, after all–she knows even the most self-serious of us can hungrily consume a piece of gossip journalism, and she embeds it within a high-brow context: read it here and move on, she suggests, instead of buying US Weekly and feeling bad about it later.

As for the style, she tells paidcontent.org’s Staci D. Kramer:

“I’ve always loved the look of the European smart tabloids—La Republica., El Pais … There ‘s a lot to be said for the sex appeal of the tabloid flavor but then incorporating into that really terrific writing and good thinking. In some ways, it’s that high-low mix that I’ve liked to do at Vanity Fair and everywhere I’ve gone really, where the visual presentation is exciting and enticing and the content is smart and well-written and upscale.”

And the eternal question: Why should I visit you when there’s already Slate/Drudge/Huffington Post/TPM/Google News and every other magazine and newspaper?” Brown’s characteristic answer: “Sensibility, darling.”

As for some thoughts from the comptetition, the Times helps us out:

“The design is lively,” said Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. But, he added, citing Google’s home page, among others, “it has to be simpler to work.”