More Redesign Hoo-Ha
December 16, 1998
Dear Editors:
I know that my aesthetic preferences may be a little out of date, but I find both your new print design and Web layout extremely unpleasant. A few months ago, I began a trial subscription to Mother Jones, having let my subscription lapse for a few years, and was appalled by the magazine’s new look. It was worse than simply an unappealing layout: it was so full of colored boxes, clever multi-coded text gimmicks, and splashy, overlapping pictographic hoo-has that it was unreadable.
I resorted to reading the online edition, so that I could at least print out a nice, clean, black-and-white copy of articles and read them, rather than having to “navigate” them. However, the online edition is still so visually overloaded that it is becoming difficult even to do that (it is a tiny bit better than it was a few months ago, though).
Please, for the sake of your readers, look at a few of the Web sites for the most popular dailies and tabloids and emulate their simplicity. Compared to Mother Jones, even the New York Post looks like the New York Review of Books.
Sincerely,
Maria Snyder
