Dairy Industry Milks a Redesign

As milk prices soar one of the dairy industry's leading trade pubs gets a redesign. Don't scoff just yet. DJ Stout (a designer for design studio Pentagram) did a remarkable job turning Dairy Today into quite the looker with limited resources.

The primary objective of the redesign initiative was to improve Dairy Today’s over all visual presentation and to give the publication a more distinctive and memorable brand identity so that it might begin to move up in the rankings. The challenge for Stout and his team was working within the parameters of the magazine’s low art budget and small design staff.

One solution was to create the simple cover convention of featuring a “portrait” style photograph of a dairy cow every issue. Dairy Today
had previously featured a variety of low quality imagery that was literal in its depiction of editorial subject matter, but not memorable or unique within the magazine’s publishing category. Photographer
Randal Ford was commissioned to shoot the series of cow “portraits” for the bi–monthly publication. Two years worth of covers were photographed in a single day’s photo session saving Dairy Today money and providing them with a distinctive and memorable visual cover identity.

I absolutely love the cover photographs. They remind me of Jill Greenberg's monkey and bear portraits, as well as Andrew Blechman's cover for his book Pigeons, which was actually a photograph taken by someone at a pigeon show. And the minimalist design makes me want to pick one of these up, even though I have no interest in the milk industry. I'm curious as to how the insides were redesigned if at all. Plan to find out. More soon.

[via unbeige]

See also:

• Jill Greenberg Moves from Apes to Ursine
• Jill Greenberg Knows How To Photomanipulate Monkeys
• Wired.com: A Look Ahead, and a Look Back
• How To: Take a Killer Portrait
• Law of Optical Volumes: The Math Behind Wired's New Logo