Car and Driver releases sexy '07 model

I love cars. I love them as design objects, and as technological wonders, and as expressions of their drivers' ids and egos. I don't really care about luxe toys for millionaires like Ferraris or Formula 1 or Panoz supercars-- I'm more interested in the everyday cars that regular people drive. That's why I love Car and Driver magazine. Sure, they love their supercars, but they'll more often talk about family sedans or cheap subcompacts or sport-utility-brat-haulers, and they always approach them with the same perspective: How much fun is it?

Apparently they've been having a little too much fun flogging those borrowed wheels around tracks, twisties, and town, because ed-in-chief Csaba Csere says they haven't gotten around to a major design overhaul of the mag in 20 years. They've been cruising for a long time, but with the December '06 issue, their art team has finally put the pedal to the metal and switched on the nitrous.

Some good things about C/D's redesign:

1. Audacious use of red and black in the columns and throughout
2. New fonts all around, including bolder and more serious-looking display type and a more readable text face
3. Expanded use of rules gives the magazine an air of official documentation
4. Feature reviews now include full-page infographics. A trunk-load of data offered in an unapologetically dense fashion. Click the thumbnail and check it out.
5. When running comparison tests of multiple cars, the text used to flow from one page to the next. Now each car's write-up is confined to its own spread. This gives a more unified feel, as you're not reading about one car while looking at images of another.

Props to Art Director Jeffrey Dworin, Associate AD Tom Cosgrove, and Assistant AD Daniel V. Winter for reinvigorating a tired marque. And props to the editor-types who gave them the green light.

Speaking of those editors, they made a strange addition: A back-page column with Franz Kafka answering questions. I mean, I love Kafka as much as the next guy, but WTF?

Comments

[TelstarLogistics]

Agreed! The whole redesign is great, but the treatment of the dataporn on the vehicle specs pages is very clever.

[Flashart]

Are you mad or just a very bad Creative Director?

All those things you said about the Car and Driver redesign as good things, I'm afraid everyone else I have spoken to sees as bad things.
Particularly bad are the "full-page infographics" and "A trunk-load of data offered in an unapologetically dense fashion". Impossible to read and absolutely no visual hierarchy, more like. The color palette is disastrous. Childish and unsophisticated primary colors throughout and what is with that blinding yellow?
And why are they putting more stats on the page and more pages of it when all the reports claim they are moving all this unpalatable techno stuff onto the website, supposedly to free up the magazine for a more graphic approach.

I really think you must be a buddy of the magazine to have written what you did.

[Junkyard Art]

Car and Driver's redesign gets a Golden Turkey Award. It is a disaster on the level of New Coke, the XFL, The Pontiac Aztek, WebTV and "Joey."

It's a perfect illustration something that has become difficult to use because the design does not follow human factors. Any designer that doesn't see this is not much of a designer at all.

Oh, and if I'm wrong, why is there a virtual lynch mob of readers out there about this so-called redesign.

http://www.autoblog.com/2006/11/22/brock-yates-returning-to-new-and-improved-car-and-driver/