Until the end of last month I was working on the the redesign of one of the biggest car magazine in Europe (as soon as the new project is launched, i will show it here in this blog).
Well, after redesigning so many magazines and newspapers, you start to identify things in common in the process of different publications (regardless of country, language or culture).
Things like the fear of changing and the worry to loose the DNA of the magazine are at the top them. =)
But one thing that is always there, is the test with readers. Although I have many doubts of the way those tests are sometimes guided, this contact with the readers can be very though provoking.
Like normally those tests happen, we are sitting in a glass room while on the room in front of us questions are made to readers comparing old and new products, despite of different other activities that variates form test to test and from company to company.
In this last one, one comment of a reader called my attention. In one of the pages of the new project of the magazine, were some new elements showing some different topics comming from social medias.
The reaction of one reader was: “I am with my magazine, and I don’t wanna see again what I was seeing in internet during my entire day”.
Well, what this reader was asking, is the same thing that makes me believe that the print will have a place in the sun: the power of disconnect.
When we are consuming news on internet, phone, TV, we are at the same time connected with the world, with our emails, with our job, with our problems and with hundred of other stuff. Print has the power to disconnect people momentarily from this crazy rhythm that sometimes life takes.
I am afraid when I arrive in a newsroom to make any redesign and I listen: “here we are online first” or “here the good and old print is the boss”.
Each media has its function, and mainly, its power!