There is nothing wrong with your magazine. Do not attempt to adjust your reading glasses!

As promised in our Eightieth Anniversary issue (November 5, 2004), you now hold in your hands the result of our efforts to graphically redesign the magazine. We hope you find the pages brighter, more friendly, and easier to get around in. (And no, we have not reduced the type size.) This redesign is roughly the eighth such effort in the magazine’s history. Some redesigns have been thorough; others have been more subtle. This one, as you see, falls into the former category.

Like previous editors, our goal in redesigning the magazine has been to make it more visually inviting to subscribers, current and potential. In May, the firm Liska + Associates, whose designers have been creating our covers since April 2002, did the initial heavy lifting, creating the template while patiently fielding the myriad tweaks offered by the editors. After months of back-and-forth among editors, designers, and various interlopers, our tireless production editor, Tiina Aleman, took the final design and made it work-no mean feat. Coordinating the entire effort was Associate Editor Grant Gallicho. The woman- and man-hours these two put in have been above and beyond the call of duty. Magazine redesign is a notoriously contentious enterprise, but the staff seems to have emerged from the process relatively intact. We hope you like it-in fact, much depends on you liking it. But if you don’t, you know how to reach us.