Paul Penson

We had a lecture from Paul Penson about what he does, and an insight into magazine design. He works for Creative review and for a lot of his lecture he was talking about the redesign and the stages he has been involved in with the magazine.


When he spoke about the redesign the first change was the size of the magazine, with the post office basing prices on size as well as weight they discovered that if they were to change the dimensions of the magazine to a 250mm square they would save money, from this they also discovered that ergonomically the new size had a nicer feel in the hand. They then used this money and put it into paper stock from the magazine, in an effort to encourage people to buy the magazine instead of purely using the ever popular website.


Another area he talked about was the title of the magazine, changing the design from the simple square with CR to a really beautiful piece of typography. They thought that with the old magazine they were relying on old buyers and not attracting a new market as people may not know the context of the magazine. It was really interesting to see what effects the decisions made and seeing how tedious the process of redesign can be, I really enjoyed the talk and it has inspired me to carry on my collection of creative review.