Hope the Readers can Digest now…
I don’t recall ever opening a copy of Reader’s Digest. I may have been tempted to do so in some crowded doctor’s waiting room. Reader’s Digest is trying to gain ground on a younger market so it will put more effort and resources into its band & web site, accounting for the 2-million drop in circulation.
Anyways… The Garamondesque logo is gone now, with it’s immense “R”, and in is a Gill Sansesque logo with a reversely immense “D”, which also sports a (maybe?) speech bubble in its counterform.
What it does achieve is a techie look more appropriate for a computer geek crowd. And, from what I gather, the majority in their readership is women, and this logo feels very masculine. But regardless of what the logo looks like, the type selection is very mediocre. Nothing about that typeface is right: the bump on the “e”, the tummy tuck of the “a”, the odd crossbar of the “t”, it all feels clunky. According to this article, the logo was designed by “famed designer Peter Arnell, architect of such brands as DKNY and The Home Depot”. Ok!
2 comments so far
Leave a reply
In my opinion, no improvement. As a brand strategist, I think the emphasis on the word “Digest” is a mistake. I suspect most reader’s associate the word “digest” with things of a gastronomic nature.
In any case, I don’t think the new type treatment either leverages or evolves the brand. The cover is cleaner, all that fabulous white space, but at the same time, it feels oddly generic. It also looks cheap.
There are times when a brand should be allowed to die, when no attempt at resurrection is possible. I think this may be the case for Reader’s Digest—and the evidence for this is on the cover—we live now in a iPhone world.
Horrifying. Must have been “bring your plumber to work week” at Arnell Group.