First Look: Travel + Leisure Redesign

Love the logo, it will do great on newsstand for overall presence.

My one comment is... why has it become popular to junk up photography with a lot of colored boxes and design elements?

I would think a travel magazine's mission should be to entice the reader to visit these places through their imagery, but to be covering up some of the most interesting focal points with all that extra stuff, communicates what... That you dont have strong enough art for it to stand alone or you're just following the trends of what everyone else is doing? There are too many redesigns going on right now that look "inspired" by other magazines. What happened to redesigning for the reader? Great design, is great design. Not.. Ohhhh, I love what these guys is doing in their magazine.. Were totally going to use that.

last line correction. "are doing"

damn it, hate when I catch a typo after posting.

I'm disappointed. When I heard T+L was re-designing, I was thrilled to see what creative, sophisticated and clever ways they could evolve their visual identity. Instead I find myself inundated by tightly cropped, suffocating type treatments that blemish what should be incredibly fresh and engaging photographic elements. Aren't we missing the demographic here entirely, folks? Uh, TRAVEL and LEISURE? It's in the name, yet somehow not conveyed. Save for the feature well, this design lacks a desire to connect with the reader and relies more on what I see as trendy type gimmicks. Shall we stop focusing on originality when in its process, it kills the fundamentals and dismisses it's target audience?

P.s. making the logo bigger doesn't make it better. :)

I find the new look a bit jarring. I want to WANT to get away, lose myself in a travel magazine but I can't because, as Jana and Tarak point out, the beautiful photos are often cut into with a white box filled with type. This might be a more appropriate treatment in a different pub. I do like the new logo though.

The logo looks much better and layouts looks fresh and neat. However, I'm not a big fan of white text boxes on the image. I think the white boxes just don't do justice to the brilliant photos used in the magz.