American Cowboy

Backpacker's Design Director, Matthew Bates, shares some highlights from sister mag (and new HQ fave!) American Cowboy:

This past fall I had the opportunity to, temporarily, trade in my hiking boots and work on the redesign of our sister publication, American Cowboy. I collaborated with AC's amazing one-woman art department, Art Director Eva Young, and now that there has been a couple of issues out the door, we wanted to share couple pages...

For the redesign, the entire structure of the magazine was redeveloped, based on research done with AC subscribers.  The new Front of Book became much larger then the previous version of the magazine. This meant the need for a new navigation. As part of this, we wanted a small element that could help hold all of these new sections together as the reader moved from from one part of the FOB to the next. We ended up going with a small "AC brand" (left) which seemed perfect since the term branding actually came from livestock brands. This also gave the magazine an alternate logo to the larger nameplate.

Note the brand in use on the above pages, and below:

We really wanted to try and balance the need for AC to have a contemporary design but also recognize the history that our readers connect to the cowboy culture. Erwin Sherman's illustrations in the Lost Skills department (above) is one area that allows that sense of history to come through.

There is such a wealth of amazing photography connected to western culture that we wanted a place to showcase it. In the Frontiers department, AC runs a small photo essay from a photographer who has captured a certain aspect of western life. This selection of images from Andy Anderson (above) has been one of my favorite so far.

More spreads from the redesign below:

Eva works on an incredibly tight budget issue to issue but has done, what I think, is a great job bring the west to life in the feature well.

The creative team for the American Cowboy redesign includes:

Eva Young, Art Director, American Cowboy
Matthew Bates, Design Director, Backpacker
Jackie McCaffrey, Assistant AD, Backpacker



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