I had the honour of overseeing the redesign of The Times Literary Supplement. An 118 year old publication that isn't actually made by The Times per se, isn't (just) literary and isn't even a supplement. It is a successful newsstand magazine printed on terrible paper, with a very antiquated look and a very passionate fanbase that doesn’t particularly embrace change.
The challenge was to position the publication at the forefront of arts, culture and ideas rather than just literature, and to attract a new, younger and more culturally diverse audience without amending the slightly untruthful title, losing the existing readership, up-paging, changing the format or sacrificing any of the words. Yup - I said it was a challenge. The biggest hurdle was that the finished design had to be heavily templated and extremely user friendly as The TLS doesn't have an in-house design team or use in-design.
The new identity aims to give a the publication a modern and approachable feel that centres around a soft orange palette accompanied by a liberal use of white space to make content easier to read and giving it space to breathe. The redesign adopted two new typefaces in support of the new identity. The Publico typeset family was chosen as a modern twist on traditional publishing serifs, and Graphik, for its versatile characteristics which lends itself well to different contexts.
Despite the many restrictions and a mammoth twelve months to complete, only three months after its launch, retail sales increased by 20%.
Credits: Creative Direction - Darren Smith & Sachini Imbuldeniya, Print Design - Graham Smith, Digital Design - Jake Cox, Marketing Director - Craig Niven
