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Remarks Concerning the Obvious
L
ast year US Air transmogrified itself into US Airways. The company issued a brochure that touted the exciting new logo and promised that over the next three
years the planes would be repainted and reupholstered. The change from “Air” to “Airways” was to reflect its growing size and preeminence in the airline industry, I suppose. (About the same time I visited the Air and Space Museum in Washington where I saw an ancient airplane with the logo “Eastern Airways.” Perhaps in another few years we may be introduced to “US Airlines,” once the company thinks its up to snuff.)
To be fair though, the time comes for all of us
when a little redecorating is in order, and that time has arrived for
Embedded Systems Programming
. For the first time since its launch in 1988, the magazine has undergone a redesign. I’m often distressed when publications I like make alterations like this. Suddenly, what had been familiar becomes strange. The parts that I liked get moved around or deleted, and it takes a while to get used to the new format. On the other hand, anything that never changes can start to look dated. Be honest, are you
still wearing tie-dye T-shirts and bell-bottoms? (Okay, but all the time?) Take a look at a 1960s issue of
Time
. You’ve got to admit that we shouldn’t wait
that
long before we make any changes.
Over the decade that it’s been around,
ESP
has gone through eight managing editors, three editors in chief, and three publishers, each of whom has imposed some changes to the look of the magazine. Like a product that undergoes so many modifications over its lifetime that it
eventually reaches a state of kludgedom, a magazine design can’t be tweaked forever. Eventually you have to start from scratch.
At the same time, you don’t want to tweak things so much as to make the magazine unrecognizable. There is always an element of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in such a process. Still, we’d like to make the magazine a little more accessible, a little more readable. More user friendly, as it were, with an easy-to-use, yet powerful, user interface.
So we called on Earl Flewellen to do our redesign, and not just because he hails from the same backwater Louisiana town where I graduated from high school. A veteran art director and magazine designer, Earl was the artist behind
Communications Systems Design
and the new look of
CADENCE
. He got together with managing editor Michael Shapiro and the
ESP
editorial staff to bring the magazine up to date. You are looking at the fruits of their labors. I think they were successful.
Incidentally, the Web page also underwent a facelift recently. Now there’s a section where you can download product demos.
Embedded.com
’s demo area is no
shareware.com
, but we’d like to make it your one shopping stop for tool demos and the like. If you can think of any other software that should be available here, let us know.
Lindsey Vereen
lvereen@cmp.com
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