New Work: ‘Vibe’

Founded in 1993, Vibe was the first mass-market magazine to follow hip-hop and urban music and culture, and its groundbreaking presence was matched by a bold, influential design. Now the magazine has launched a redesign that coincides with its 15th anniversary. Working with Vibe editor-in-chief Danyel Smith, art director Mark Shaw, and photo editor Robyn Forest, Luke Hayman has developed a new format for the magazine that looks back to the original designed by Gary Koepke and subsequent redesigns by Robert Newman and Florian Bachleda. At the same time it introduces new elements that make the magazine dynamic and surprising and give it a cohesive structure. (Editor Smith calls this “elegance and toughness,” a description that could also apply to the redesign’s typography.)

“Vibe is an icon in the magazine world,” says Hayman. “This was an exciting opportunity to sample and remix the rich heritage of its famed design and photography.”

A look inside after the jump.

To aid in navigation and structure, the redesign establishes a strong and consistent page branding language. For department headers, the designers revisited the playful use of typography of the original, with words broken up and shuffled in unusual ways, and reinstated the use of Vibe Gothic, developed for the magazine in 1993. But these have now been paired with the expressive Leitura Display font, used for swashes in headlines and pull quotes throughout the magazine. (Leitura is used for body text.)

For a page branding device—especially for those pages that must compete with facing ad pages—the redesign employs a new five bar graphic, inspired by a music cleft, that is easily recognizable but infinitely flexible and programmed to evolve. Segments may be knocked out for factoids (“Fantasia is the first cousin of K-Ci and JoJo Hailey aka one half of Jodeci”) and can be customized for content (red and blue for a piece about the election, for example). The redesign coincides with a new trim size for the magazine and the forward thinking move of its album reviews to its website. (Singles and playlists will continue to be reviewed in print.)

Project Team: Luke Hayman, Rami Moghadam