The Popularity Issue.
So currently on the newstands is our second annual Popularity Issue.
Last years was actually something of a moment for the design of the magazine, being the first time we got a magazine back from the printers, picked it up and felt almost good about what we were doing. It works like that in magazines; you slave away for weeks not feeling like you’re getting anywhere and then you do something good, that not only gives the magazine a bit of confidence, but also informs the way we treat the design, moves it on a bit and gives us some new ways of thinking.
So there was a bit of pressure on us to do something we would be proud of. We met many times, usually to plan elaborate photo-shoots which never quite saw the light of day. Things reached something of a critical mass when the copy started to roll in I really began to worry that although we had a lot of interesting ideas, there wasn’t much of an organizing principle to how they related to each other. We had a pretty long run of pages (37) and a huge slew of copy.
So we devised a system where we gave each story a relevant data-driven metric, and plotted those numbers on a scale which ran as a spine through all the 37 pages, beginning at 0 and running to 14,594,874,110,347. Some figures are literal (Nordstrom’s revenue, $9.7 billion), others symbolic (the rpms of the top-selling turntable, 33⅓).
The spine (or ‘meter’ as we ended up calling it) opened-up for larger stories - in my head I was imagining it much in the same way you pinch and expand a graphic on an iPad, that reveals more content when you zoom in. We then placed smaller stories, having them pinging out of the meter as and when they fell numerically - conceptually thinking of those a bit like hyperlinks. To add a sense of progress and forward energy, a color spectrum was used, so the spot color for each story was taken from the color at the place it appeared on the meter.
It seems a lot more complicated talking about it rather than looking at it. So.. here it is. One full 37-page infographic. As it appears in the magazine.
