Washington Magazine presents a unique opportunity to cultivate and deepen relationships with our WashU alumni and friends by delivering a meaningful, memorable reader experience through showcasing the university as a premier institution for research, scholarship, innovation, and success. But in 2018, our readership surveys indicated that we were losing ground in connecting with our audience. With the many changes our institution went through in 2019, including our campus transformation, the inauguration of our 15th chancellor, and the retirement of our chief magazine designer, it became clear that it was time to re-imagine the magazine to align it with our new leadership and audience preferences.
We used recent research to understand our readers' awareness of our magazine: how they use it, their reactions to it, and to what extent we were engaging them. We also wanted to explore perceptions—through survey and focus groups—of some of our competitors' magazines, to see how ours compared, and we wanted to gauge their affinity for alternative content and design options.
From this information, we embarked on a multi-phase process where we re-imagined our content strategy, as well as our design. It was an iterative process, bringing in new designers and content contributors, but one that resulted in sizable, sustainable improvements in reader engagement, recall, and affinity for the magazine, and created a new collaborative magazine team as well.
From the Judges
Visual interest is appealing. Feels more current and less traditional than past design. There is cohesion throughout the publication, tying the colors and typeface together.
