2020 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

Design > Magazine/Newspaper Redesign > Upper Midwest

Awarded to

ABA Creative Group: Nick Panos, Creative Director; Brenan Sharp, Design Director; Sara Wadford, Senior Designer; Amanda Fry, Designer; Elmarie Jara, Designer; Tahiti Spears, Designer

Entry details

ABA Journal

Issue or publication date: Sept-Oct 2019
Publication name: ABA Journal
Publishing company: American Bar Association
Website home page: ABAJournal.com

Please describe the publication's mission and readership:

The ABA Journal is the flagship magazine for the American Bar Association and signature publication for the legal profession. The Journal is an award-winning, dynamic multimedia platform delivering legal journalism with an independent voice. The Journal informs, engages and stimulates important conversations that define the American legal system and help it respond to important issues of the day. The Journal and its companion website, newsletters and podcasts ensure it has among the largest readership of any legal publication in the world. While the Journal serves as a key benefit to members of the American Bar Association, it maintains editorial independence and integrity, allowing it to provide critical coverage of the trends, people and business of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

After rejecting an outside agencies work, our internal design team rolled up our sleeves and began with a comprehensive creative brief. We surveyed our readers, board and internal team to establish guidelines to a design that would only compete with itself. Our nameplate carried too much brand recognition, so we gave it a facelift. We updated it to the present day by getting rid of the outside rules and drop shadow, and modifying the characters by straightening the curves of the serifs. For the interior we established a versatile three column grid. We then selected Sabon for the body copy font because it is highly legible while also quietly resting upon the page. Complimenting Sabon is the full suite of the sans serif font, Gotham, for headlines, captions and sidebars. We incorporated a sophisticated color palette that contains a rich black with many high contrasting secondary colors. We went unorthodox with folio placement and picture boxes, while still maintaining the sophistication our readers expect by adding more white space with an expanded trim size and brighter paper. The overall redesign also embraces a cleaner approach with wider margins to make each page more inviting. Department pages are decidedly more stately by showing a better balance of positive and negative space. Feature layouts are now given the proper stage to truly stand out. The overall package truly looks and reads as an indispensable magazine, promising to contain valuable information of the legal profession.

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