Look! A New Look

The pages of this magazine are regularly filled with new concepts by

national retail chains. On a somewhat regular basis, especially in today’s intensely competitive environment, retailers decide their stores need a new look. It isn’t always driven by outside forces. It’s just some internal clock that buzzes one morning, saying “time for a change.”

That internal clock has buzzed for this magazine. For more than 100 years, we’ve been a style-setter for one of the most demanding audiences in the country. We know that you live and die by design and expect the magazine that informs and inspires you to be just as driven.

We last redesigned the magazine in 2000, changing templates, typefaces, layout elements, the cover concept and our logo. That award-winning redesign, courtesy of Gensler, has served us well, bringing the look and feel of the magazine into the 21st Century. But eight years later, buzzzzzzz…

So we present to you a new look that we feel is more exciting, more readable, with more and larger graphics but with even more information than before. “We want to deliver readers what they expect and a little that they don’t, all in a way that is easy to read and navigate,” says Kim Pegram, our art director, who tackled this project in-house.

You’ll also notice a new logo, beginning with this month’s cover. And for that, we offer a special thanks to the team at WD Partners that volunteered its creative efforts to updating our brand: Eric Daniel, Christopher Michaels, Mason Harding, Monica Fox, Suling Hsu and Kimberly Orr.

The changes are not limited to design, either. We’ve introduced a stable of new columns, as well (some of which will alternate, month to month): Problem/Solution, which gets inside a new retail project; Sector Spotlight, each of which covers trends in a specific retail segment; The VMSD Showroom, an expanded product trends section; Field Report, providing insights from design firms on specific issues; and Creative Kickstarts, offering a stimulating boost to keep your wheels turning.

Nor are the design changes limited to the magazine. An information company can no longer live by print alone. So our web site, vmsd.com, will also be more modern and more useful and will continue to evolve. Photo galleries with more retail images. A better search engine. Blogs. More interactivity. A community of shared commentary. You can already see our new logo on this site.

I periodically pull down a volume of our archived magazines from our library shelves here in Cincinnati and look at where we – the magazine and the industry – have been. The constant, of course, is change. The challenge, for both of us, is good change.

We think you’ll agree that this is good change.