The New Quarterly celebrates a new look

The New Quarterly is launching a dramatic new look tonight in Kitchener with an event featuring the St. Catharines troupe Theatre Beyond Words (shown) which is featured in the new issue. (The performance takes place at the Registry Theatre, 122 Frederick Street; $20 for adults; $15 for students.)

What started out more than 25 years ago as a hand-assembled, stapled compilation, funded by $1,000 donations by three well-known Canadian writers, has grown into a mature, professional and important part of Canadian literary and cultural landscape.

The stylish redesign is by Dave Donald, who also does art direction for This Magazine and was the founding art director of Design Edge Canada. He was the associate art director at Chatelaine before striking off on his own.

(Before, the magazine rarely used colour, even on its cover and was in the more-or-less standard "academic journal" format.) The new design and shape has the added benefit of giving the magazine 28% more words on a page and new layout options.

Here's how the magazine describes its transformation:

The New Quarterly’s digs have changed over the years, both our office locale and the book itself, the book that’s the home for the words we publish. We started out with modest means: hand collated, staple bound, printed in the basement, readied for press with an exacto knife and a pot of hot wax. Eventually we switched to an outside press, a perfect binding. We added colour to the cover, a photograph. Our typeface got larger and then smaller. We changed our masthead, spiffed up the interior design, much like a couple moving from apartment to townhouse to country house, acquiring more and better furnishings as they go. Still, though we were not unhappy, we began to yearn for a change, a roomier interior, a more contemporary look. So we applied for a mortgage, or at least for a grant (the Support for Art and Literary Magazines component of the Canada Magazine Fund), and began to shop around for an architect. We found him in Dave Donald.

Managing Editor Rosalynn Tyo goes into more detail in a posting on the Shoestring blog published by Magazines Canada.

[Disclosure: I work from time to time with TNQ as a consultant.]