Re-Refreshed

On September 13, 2013, The New Yorker announced “a new look for Goings On About Town, a redrawn update of the classic Irvin font, and other design changes” (see here). Among the design changes was the decoration of Goings On About Town’s page-corners with angular black brackets. I hated those brackets (see my post on the September 23, 2013 issue, in which I called them, among other things, “pieces of swastika”). The magazine eventually toned down the bracket color from black to gray. But their presence still irked me. Now, I see they’ve been dropped. The brackets are gone (hooray!), and so are the art deco-ish emblems that adorned GOAT’s departmental titles (Art, Night Life, Movies, etc.). The look of the pages is subtly cleaner and simpler, with emphasis on the writing, not the design. I applaud the magazine for making these changes.