How bad is the design in children's magazines today? Are the fonts too garish, the ordering of elements too haphazard? Do kids' reads really need to SCREAM at their short stack readers? Jandos doesn't think so. Today he takes a look at magazine design for the ankle biter set, and finds it has changed from when he was reading such publications as MAD and Ranger Rick:
Kids magazines certainly weren’t always as bleak as the current versions. The magazines I remember loving in my childhood—Ranger Rick, Dynamite—a pop culture journal from Scholastic with a snarky (by 5th grade standards) sense of humor, and Mad all featured stories that sustained for pages, a comparatively challenging vocabulary and more sophisticated (and toned-down) color pallets and typography. Kids liked Mad, even though it was black and white and had jokes they didn’t get because it seemed grown-up and cool. I see no big change that requires Kiddie Time to be the way it is now—it’s aimed at kids in third, fourth and fifth grades who are, by that time, reading chapter books–gawd-awful chapter books—but chapter books! And without pictures! So why is TimeMaxim and Lucky and not for Time and Fortune?
It would be tempting to blame child psychologists–those killjoys who thought that smurfs and dragons working out tedious interpersonal problems would somehow make for better television than 16-ton anvils and cliff plunges. But, I would guess that, while every kids glossy claims a team of shrinks and educators on board, they’re probably not actually paid, they probably don’t really come into the office, and they probably have especially little to do with how material is packaged—instead contenting themselves to object to a word or sentence here or there. I would love to hear from someone with experience on the design or review side of kids magazines on this. It seems more likely that the wacky colors come from fuzzy inherited wisdom—inspired by the aesthetics of cartoons and toy packaging.
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