Red pens — we burn through them. We agonize over each comma, verb mood, and every tool line in this magazine. We pore over more than 1,000 photos to select about 150 just-right pictures that make it onto our pages. We spend hours directing food photography — as if the food will actually do something — and drive our photographers crazy with demands of our subjects (“Tell her to look at the camera and smile!”). We completely sweat every word on the cover (“Does it have a purpose? Is it an active, positive word?”). We spare ourselves from embarrassment (never again will we have a “beast of chicken” in a dining review) and from being too cliché, colloquial, or snarky in tone (you can read a national magazine for that). And the ads on our pages — up to 150 of them in each issue — receive the same treatment; we fuss over them until, in our view and the client’s, they are perfect.
Of course we’re not changing the world and saving lives, though we take the responsibility and privilege of publishing the city magazine here very seriously. Every piece of this magazine is an opportunity to connect, and our goal is to make reading Evansville Living as enjoyable and beautiful as possible.
That’s why this issue looks very different from our last issue — and it’s not only because the adorable Roscoe is on our cover, though it is the first time we’ve featured a cover dog!
For more than a year, we have planned the renovation of the way you experience Evansville Living. In the magazine business it’s called a redesign. Industry magazines devote barrels of ink to dissecting successful redesigns, awards are given by our publishing trade associations, and entire design firms have built their business on aiding big publishers in their renovations. We can’t rest on our laurels. We must stay fresh and relevant, even if that means giving up what brought us to the dance.
Initiating this complex process, we asked ourselves: Are we providing everything we can for our readers? How can we make Evansville Living even more enjoyable? What we landed on is a much more interactive architecture designed to enhance reader engagement. We gratefully — and often — accept compliments that our magazine pages are pretty to look at. If they’re not looked at, of course, they aren’t read. Our new presentation makes the best use of our real estate, providing you with more and deeper information than ever before.
Evansville Living’s new look is modern, vibrant, and optimistic, with a good dose of verve, and that’s due to our creative director, Laura Mathis, and art director Heather Gray. Of course, they received plenty of support from the entire art and editorial team, as well as the whole office. (Laura designed our inaugural style nearly 13 years ago!)
I hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed producing it.
As always, I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Kristen K. Tucker
Publisher & Editor
