The Standard revisited

June 11, 2001 2:46 PM

The Standard revisited The Industry Standard print magazine has launched it's new design. Check your mailboxes and discuss...
posted by brian (10 comments total)

The cover looks like it took about 5 seconds and needs to be re-worked but I like the inside. Serif is our friend.
posted by brian at 2:50 PM on June 11, 2001

I think it's so funny that these magazines are so damn thin now - 2 years ago they were giving the yellow pages a run for their money in the hefty category. They're either consolidating or trying to erase "Internet" from their lexicon.
posted by owillis at 3:13 PM on June 11, 2001

I have a (free till December, from my old job) subscription to Business 2.0. Since it slimmed down -- I do have a copy from last year that rivaled my Evanston phone book -- I'm getting to quite like it: heavy use of XPLANE graphics, for instance, and while it's not exactly radical regular folks in perspective, it's sassy and cynical enough at times. Not that there's been any particular apologia for their role in the hype ...
posted by dhartung at 4:43 PM on June 11, 2001

Fewer ads. Fewer advertisers. Thinner because there are pages. Seen Fast Company lately? It's a third of its former heft.
posted by christina at 4:44 PM on June 11, 2001

Here is a lil' image of the new cover design.
posted by brian at 4:59 PM on June 11, 2001

dan, don't get too hooked on the "new" business2.0, since you're likely to start receiving the likely to be watered down business3.0 soon...
posted by mmanning at 6:08 PM on June 11, 2001

Does the Standard have anything left to say? Retrenched, after shutting up shop in London; pared down, because there's frankly little "new economy" to report. (I don't even think Nicole Chiala had much to do with the new look...)

And those fonts are awful, especially when juxtaposed: the 1910s Bell-cum-Cooper "Newsweek"-ish headline beneath the nondescript sans. Reminds me of the kind of design you see in the American newsweeklies, only arse-backwards.

At least Wired still contains that one pesky article a month that makes it worth buying.
posted by holgate at 6:50 PM on June 11, 2001

On plane trips, I used to choose between the Industry Standard and the Red Herring based on weight and cover design. I guess weight is a wash now (you could read either one front to back before your plane taxies to the runway), but if I were to decide on design now... it would be a no-brainer.

This cover looks like an idea that was never quite finished. And the fonts are awful, the page design is immature and uncomfortable. And in this premier issue, there's not a single interesting article to be found.

Oh, and if you can read anything into cheesy Flash intros, nobody should get their hopes up about the new Business 2.0, either.
posted by barkingmoose at 8:37 PM on June 11, 2001

Heh. The last time Spy returned from the dead, as a former subscriber I was offered a really good five-year deal. I was hopeful, so I took them up on it. When they folded again, my subscription morphed into P.O.V., a decent-but-dull middlebrow men's magazine; when that folded, it became GQ for a few issues then expired.

I'm currently getting a Maximum PC subscription that similarly is the third incarnation of some long-term thing I took somebody up on ages ago, and can't even remember this one. Oddly enough, it's turned out to be a fun magazine that I enjoy more than its predecessors, even if I don't put a new overclocked Pentium III in my mobo every other month.
posted by dhartung at 12:20 AM on June 12, 2001

The Industry Standard has really thinned their content down. As a professional researcher/analyst, I used their stuff quite often about a year ago. Now I don't even hit their home page, because there are usually no more than 2 or 3 new articles...
posted by preguicoso at 8:05 AM on June 12, 2001