Western Living unveils redesigned, bumper Designer of the Year issue

Western Living magazine is unveiling a refreshed, new look with its September issue which highlights the winner of its annual Designers of the Year competition. It is the largest issue in more than 20 years. 

The magazine is a lynchpin of western Canadian publishing and the western flagship of its parent company, TC Media, and has a total of 587,000 readers according to the spring 2013 PMB. 

This year, the Designers of the Year event will be held on Thursday, September 12th in Vancouver and on Wednesday, October 2nd in Calgary. It celebrates the best new designs in Western Canada, as judged by Canada's foremost designers and architects. In partnership with IDSwest, the magazine is hosting its first-ever Western Living Design Week, to be held from September 12 to 22. 

It's all but inevitable that when a new art director takes over a visual redesign can't be far behind, though a lot of the structural, editorial changes in the magazine have been driven by editor-in-chief Anicka Quin. Paul Roelofs returned to be the art director of both Western Living and Vancouver magazines last December after a time in the U.S. He had been AD of Western Living from 1988 to 1993 before working on Garden Design magazine and Saveur.He then joined Time Inc.'s launch of InStyle magazine as creative director from 1995 to 2005, during which time he also handled various spinoffs: InStyle Weddings, InStyle Home, InStyle The Look and InStyle Makeover.