Sojourners magazine just had its first redesign in my seven years of working here, and all I can say is “wow,” because I have a limited graphic-design vocabulary.
Seriously, the July issue has a really striking, clean look, and our art director, Ed, has started to do this cool thing with photos where he puts them together in a band across the page without borders between them, so that it looks like a cross between a filmstrip and the hippest quilt ever (which is saying something if you know quilts). That ocher color we used sometimes, which was getting old, is finito. There is a great interplay between words and images. It’s all the reasons why I love to read a paper magazine instead of just squinting at the stripped-down Helvetica word string online.
Of course, the words are great too. In addition to our lineup of feature articles, for the redesign we have new columns, by environmentalist Bill McKibben, pastor Joel C. Hunter, author Cathleen Falsani, and film critic Gareth Higgins. (Next month the new columnists will be environmental activist Majora Carter, pastor Adam Hamilton, and interfaith youth worker Eboo Patel.) We’ve started a new “how-to” series on all manner of peace and justice concerns (first up: how to start a community garden at your church). Don’t worry – these haven’t displaced our returning columnists like Rose Berger, whose July reflection, on biblical and personal dreams as “an eruption of vibrant, feral truth into the waking world,” is exceptionally good. And, as usual, reading Ed Spivey’s H’rumphs nearly made me snort my drinking water directly onto my keyboard.
So if you find that in your life, as the Onion’s recent not-so-far-from-the-truth satire reports, 90% Of Waking Hours are Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles, try picking up something that rustles rather than blinks, that you can read outside before handing on to a friend, and that … well … wows you.
Check out the redesigned magazine below (click the bottom right-hand corner to turn the page). For a larger view click here.
Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners magazine.
