We’re back from Dallas – totally underrated city, by the way. Why didn’t anyone tell me?
Had a fantastic time. In other news, I also returned home to find my new edition of Newsweek, replete with its ballyhooed redesign. I was ready to give it a chance – classier masthead, thicker paper, perhaps indicating the future of newsmagazines. But I can’t get past one major problem.
The font. Rockwell. Abysmal, just a totally ridiculous decision. 
You know it. The overstated Burger King font. Gatorade’s subtle new branding campaign. (Replete with horrific H&J). AMC’s go-to screen explainer. A hit member of a class of slab-serifs, it could not be more over-the-top, beating you over the head with brutish inelegance. It makes me feel stupider just looking at it. I eschew Burger King because of this terrible font.
I say all this, and could live with Rockwell as Newsweek‘s decorative headline font – in fact, it is a close cousin of Newsweek‘s traditional mast.
But the mag’s decision to install it as certain elements of body copy couldn’t be uglier. The actual paragraph text is a bit of deviation – a marriage of slab-serif and serif, but still unrefined.
In addition, the New York Times and Fortune occasionally use a Rockwell cousin in heads. Worse yet – it’s simply a strain to read: large, ugly, unrefined and clumsy. The whole magazine now resembles a college student’s desperate attempt to beef up a term paper. Awful. Unreadable. Print, as we know it, may now be totally dead.
I kept flipping from article to cover back to article to make sure I didn’t accidently receive a copy of U.S. News and World Report.
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