The Paris Review redesign: a magazine made for reading and keeping

The Paris Review changed its physical reading experience rather than treating its cover as an isolated logo exercise. Pentagram’s account places the relaunch in Winter 2021, led by Matt Willey with editor Emily Stokes and art director Na Kim. Stokes’s 8 December 2021 announcement confirms the new Winter issue. The 2022 date belongs to the D&AD archive entry, not the original launch. ^[1][2][3]

The team reduced the format and used warmer, textured paper. Moving contributor information and issue identification onto the spine freed the front for artwork and helped distinguish issues when shelved. The wordmark shifted to Founders Grotesk, while archived issues from the late 1960s and early 1970s supplied references for a less crowded composition. ^[1]

These choices address different moments: carrying an issue, holding it open, encountering the cover and finding it again among stored copies. Our interpretation is that the coherence comes from designing those moments together, rather than adding the same decorative style everywhere.

The designer, client and awards archive corroborate a physical redesign and its book-like qualities. The client describes the Winter 2021 issue as a return to aspects of earlier issues, and D&AD lists the project in its 2022 magazine and newspaper design category. ^[1][2][3]

This establishes what changed and when. It does not measure whether readers finished more articles, renewed subscriptions more often or became more willing to pay.

The cited accounts provide no controlled comparison of reading time, completion, sales or renewal rates. A design award or a designer’s intended benefit is not a measured commercial result. Nor do these sources establish that every editorial or operating aspect remained untouched.

The useful hypothesis is narrower: a physical format can reduce friction across reading and storage. Whether that hypothesis holds for another publication needs observation with its actual readers and distribution conditions.

Use this approach when a publication is intended to be read deeply and revisited. Start with where it is carried, how it is held and how an older issue is retrieved. Keeping the cover quiet is one possible response, not a rule that all publications should become minimalist.

There are trade-offs. Smaller pages can constrain images and typography; moving information to the spine may help a shelf while doing less for a flat display. These are proposed design considerations, not documented failures of this project.

Test a complete sequence with representative readers: pick up an issue, find a contribution, read a substantial passage and retrieve the same issue later. Record observed confusion or handling difficulty before asking for aesthetic opinions.

For a digital publication, test the analogous tasks: enter from search, understand the article’s scope, resume after interruption and find a previously read passage. Preserve readable type, clear hierarchy and source access. Borrow the attention to reading behavior, not a paper texture or typeface in isolation. These are evaluation suggestions, not experiments reported by The Paris Review.