The Site's New Look

Yes, we have most definitely redesigned The Atlantic.com, as part of a broader effort that includes a redesign of the print magazine. Today's relaunch provides a first look at our new nameplate--our revived nameplate, really.  To create it, the graphic designer Michael Bierut and his team at the design firm Pentagram adapted a logo that The Atlantic used for more than 35 years in the middle of the last century. The image of the November cover, to the right, shows how the nameplate and our new fonts appear on the magazine.

Working with Pentagram, our art director, Jason Treat, has added a substantial dash of color to the site. When you refresh the home page, you'll see the color in the horizontal bar at the top of the page change, as it rotates through a set palette. There's no grand theory at work here--no attempt to link a particular shade with a particular idea or argument or piece of news; we just like the vibrancy of the colors and the freshness that comes with their changing. Each of our bloggers has been assigned a color, which will not change: Andrew Sullivan has a shade of blue, Megan McArdle green, Ta-Nehisi Coates silver, and so forth. We've also added a new blogger--Barbara Wallraff, who, in applying that neologism to herself, will expand her monthly Atlantic column on language into a rolling online conversation about words. (Her color is a royal purple.)

Navigation on the site remains the same, with one exception. On the navigation bar, we've substituted "Dispatches" for "The Current." As regular visitors have probably noticed, along with the short commentaries we've been doing under the heading "The Current," we've also been doing more and more reported and analytical dispatches on the site, and it seemed sensible to combine them all into one category. "The Current" may return down the road in a different form, as one of several new features we're planning in the coming months.

Next week, when the November issue reaches subscribers, they'll see that we've substantially restructured the magazine. I'll have more to say about that then, and Michael Bierut will weigh in with other details about the redesign. (In conjunction with the redesign, our colleagues in marketing have cooked up a pretty dramatic advertising campaign.) But our striking yet familiar nameplate hints at our overall direction. Both on the Web and in print, we set out with this redesign to recommit ourselves to the tradition of The Atlantic as the home for bold, original thinking and writing, while keeping ourselves in sync with a world that needs that kind of work as much as it ever has.