Taking inspiration from magazine covers to refresh my personal brand and blog design

A little over a month ago I wrote about my ongoing brand reshuffle, focussing first on blog design. Today I am putting the finishing touches on the new look for Upstart Blogger. Not much has changed but I feel that the result is a considerable improvement over the outgoing design. Before moving on to part two, an explanation of my blog alignment and personal branding strategy, I’d like to outline my redesign process and, in particular, take a look at the inspiration behind the changes.

In recent months, whist looking for a replacement for the outgoing slab serif Lubalin Graph, I’ve spent a lot of time at typophile.com, a forum where like minded individuals discuss, amongst other things, the finer points of typography.

A couple of posts caught my eye. In particular one on modern magazine cover design discussing the recent typographical changes at British GQ and Esquire. Both magazines switched to bold slab serif fonts for their covers, choosing Soho by Sebastian Lester and Stag by Christian Schwartz respectively. I already own a license for Soho and its sans serif sibling Soho Gothic and was 99% certain that Sebastian Lester’s fine pair of typefaces would take care of my branding.

And then I saw this image of Lilly Allen sprawled all over the front page of a recent issue of British GQ, accompanied by Soho in a variety of weights.

Perhaps it was my inherent dislike of Lilly Allen and all that she stands for that made me take a second look at Soho. I’ll leave my dissection of Miss Allen, and her equally dislikable father, Keith Allen, for another blog and another day, but whatever my reasons, the damage was done. I no longer wanted Soho to be the face of my brand as I moved forward through 2009 and beyond.

Thankfully I didn’t have to look much further for an all together more attractive slab serif. Powerful but restrained, Stag made the following covers of Esquire look stylish and purposeful. In comparison, GQ looked sleazy.

With a fresh license for Stag in my digital hands it was time to go to work on the header and splash graphics that cement the Upstart Blogger aesthetic. Simple red text for the masthead, supplemented by white text on an identical red background for the splash images. The result can be seen at the top of the page, at the top of the sidebar and at the bottom of the page just above the footer.

In case you haven’t noticed, the new footer image heralds the introduction of the final incarnation of the Inner Circle. If you want thousands of extra unique visitors every day then take a look.

Other changes included a very subtle change of background from clear white to an ever so slightly darker white that makes the text look a little crisper and tighter. The body font moves from Helvetica Neue to Myriad Pro, degrading gracefully through Helvetica and Arial to ensure readability across operating systems and browsers.

The red used is slightly darker than before, the flesh tones used to highlight comments are a shade or two lighter, the blue highlight used for blockquotes remains the same and the lines separating content and indicating clickable sections such as menus change from blue to black for more contrast. Text sizes have remained the same with a tiny amount of extra spacing added to allow the content to breath.

Finally, the imposing header image on the front page is replaced with a single one line masthead.

As with all new designs, or redesigns, no matter how small, there are bound to be a few teething problems here are there. If you spot any please let me know.