Features
October 30, 2013 •
Birth & Rebirth
Five years ago, I compared launching a magazine to giving birth, a wild ride that’s by turns exhilarating, emotional and painful — and one that ultimately reaps an amazing reward. And now, as Stationery Trends enters its kindergarten year, we’re leaving our formative years behind to unveil a new look more in keeping with our new maturity as well as current design trends. While the redesign process has not been a simple one, I am very proud of the results — as well as the entire team who made it happen.
You’ve already seen the changes to our cover, logo, fonts and table of contents. And you may have noticed our headers and footers have been tweaked as well. As you read on you’ll also find:
- Retooled and rethought departments starting with Fresh Picks, Show Me Some, The Color Wheel and Event To Remember and extending all the way through the Hit List, our columns — of which we now run two instead of three, as we’ve done in the past — and P.S.
- New departments up front. Seasonal Sketchbook lets us all get a glimpse of what to expect in the upcoming season and beyond, with images and inspirations submitted by top designers and retailers. The Blog Log lets us bring the digital world in our pages by asking top stationery and design bloggers to share their inspirations and favorite finds.
- Fresh approaches to our features as well as our designer and retailer profiles.
We hope you enjoy perusing them as much as we enjoyed redesigning them. With an audience consisting of so many design professionals, the task definitely seemed daunting at times. If you have any comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line — my email can be found on our (new) masthead on the right.
This year also marks big changes for the National Stationery Show (NSS). Although the 2013 edition will be its 67th year, the show still has plenty of spring in its step. Making headlines is a co-location with the new tradeshow Creative & Lifestyle Arts (C&LA), three new product-specific pavilions, a dizzying educational program, the LOUIE awards program celebrating its 25th silver anniversary, the return of Party on the Battery and, of course, Stationery Today. You can read all about it on our show preview on page 78, and don’t miss all the gorgeous stationery in our annual Lookbook that follows.
