The Quarto Review

The Quarto Review had been redesigned four times since 1971, and each redesign had added a column. By the time we arrived, the front matter ran to eleven pages, the contributor notes had migrated to the back, and a reader who wanted the long essay in the middle had to get past two departments and a poem to reach it. Circulation was stable. Reading time, according to their own survey, was not.

We asked the editors to describe a good issue without using the word design. What came back was almost entirely about pacing: one long piece that earns forty minutes, two shorter ones that can be read on a train, poems that need to arrive without ceremony. The redesign is an attempt to build that pacing into the object, so that the shape of the issue tells you how to spend your evening with it.

The long essay now opens on a right-hand page with nothing above it and runs uninterrupted — no jumps, no pull-quotes, no sidebar. Shorter pieces sit in a narrower measure on a tinted stock that you can find by fanning the block with your thumb. The poems have their own paper and their own silence around them. Contributor notes went back to the front, where readers said they looked for them, and the front matter lost seven pages that nobody could defend.

Typographically it is a conservative redesign, and deliberately so. We recut nothing, chose a text serif with a large enough x-height to survive the quarterly's slightly grey newsprint, and spent most of the type budget on spacing rather than on faces. The most consequential decision in the whole project was raising the leading by three-quarters of a point, which cost four pages an issue and was argued about for six weeks.

Two issues in, the reader survey came back with the number the editors wanted: median time spent with an issue up by nineteen minutes. Nobody mentioned the typeface.