Poetry Magazine Redesign
BY Fred Sasaki
We’ve justified everything to the left and simplified wherever possible—note how we’ve abandoned roman numerals! The text feels more balanced without undue font variation. Pentagram refined the historic Eric Gill Pegasus and moved it back inside the magazine.
The new table of contents is more efficient and can accommodate longer titles. We eliminated the redundancy of dating this page in addition to the one before.
Here you’ll notice smaller margins, better use of space, longer lines of poetry, and left-justified author footers on every page. We lose the tapered rule but gain so much in its place —namely, more poetry!
Readers will find more prose per page as well!
Our bigger text box provides more room for visual art.
In our previous design, this poem would have broken in several places and necessitated a foldout, which we will continue to publish as needed.
We’ve added pull quotes preceding prose to ease and illuminate the reader’s experience.
We’ve added pull quotes throughout as well to help break up longer stretches of text.
Readers might be relieved to find that we’ve retained one of Poetry’s most iconic typographic features—the starred first appearance.
We’re adding color ads to our back page—subscribe today for a full look at what’s new!
This new year the print edition of Poetry magazine gets a fresh interior design by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut. Extra special thanks to associate partner Laitsz Ho for her meticulous work and Tess McCann for coordinating everything. Coincidental with the redesign, we thought I’d name a few particulars and share a preview of Poetry’s new look in the slideshow above. (For a detailed account of our typographical history, see Paul F. Gehl’s “100 Years of Poetry: Designing the Magazine, 1912–2012.”)
Readers will find Poetry at its same distinctive trim size but with a lot more room for art and poetry (it’s bigger on the inside!). The primary reason we embarked on a redesign was to solve the problem of poetry outgrowing our pages—longer lines, hybrid works, and “poetics of space” made it necessary to make room for what’s new.
The new design will better accommodate poets whose work, as contributor Jorie Graham describes it, are “working with lines that acquire momentum as they move down the page, yet need to carry that momentum across shifting distances of breath and attention.” It will also enhance the presentation of the texture and detail in work by poets whose visual poems you will see in issues to come.
We’ve achieved this by introducing a more accommodating page grid featuring tighter margins and zero ornamentation—we bid farewell to our beloved tapered rule after decades of valuable service. We’re also departing from the old-style Bembo and Pietro serif fonts, which have typified Poetry for over half a century (look for an article on its usage forthcoming from former Poetry magazine art director Bob Williams). We set the “quotidien” typeface Untitled Serif in its place—which is based from Untitled Sans and drawn from the old-style genre of types, and “related neither by skeleton nor a traditional aesthetic connection, but by concept only.” Here is a rundown of the typeface from the Klim Type Foundry itself. This, we feel, gives us less font and more poetry.
We love our new design and what it brings forward—which is, quite simply, the best poems being printed today.