Berkshire Living is 5 Years Old!

 

Holy crap! Yes, you’ve probably read that before in one of my previous columns, but this time I really mean it. The Nov/Dec 2009 issue out now, is the fifth anniversary issue of Berkshire Living. I really didn’t imagine back in 2004 when we launched that, five years later, our little magazine created on my dining room table would have two award-winning sibling publications (BBQ: Berkshire Business Quarterly and Home+Garden), a robust website (berkshireliving.com), a popular email newsletter (BerkshireDaily) and a bunch of cultural partners with whom we work with very closely (Berkshire International Film Festival, Jacob’s Pillow, Berkshire Theatre Festival, and Norman Rockwell Museum— with more to come in 2010). It has been a wild ride.

            I recently took a look at the prototype we created to shop our new publication around to advertisers. It was supposed to be a relatively true representation of what Berkshire Living was going to be when it launched in December 2004. Our founding, and current, editor-in-chief and creative director, Seth Rogovoy and Laura Morris, respectively, and I worked tirelessly on the sixteen-page piece and were more than proud of ourselves when I began sharing it with prospective advertisers. While the prototype certainly did its job, when I look at it now, I have to laugh—it looks completely different from what Berkshire Living has evolved into. The past five years have definitely seen this magazine’s design change, and with this issue, the evolution is a little more dramatic.

            We took the opportunity of our fifth anniversary to do some reorganizing and freshening up of our beautiful pages. From time to time, we like to take a thirty-thousand-feet view of how the magazine looks and how the information is organized. This time we decided to take some dramatic steps, which as it often happens, led to some other changes we hadn’t expected to make. First, and most significantly, we took the Culture Calendar, Gallery Listings, and Dining Guide and moved them to a new section in the back of the magazine simply called “The Guide.” We felt that it would be best if all of our key resources were clustered in one place and made to look clean and easy to read. Now, when you’re planning your day/night/weekend activities, you can simply open the magazine to the back and check out the orange-bordered section and choose your fun.

            Next, because we were creating a new look for “The Guide,” we decided to mess around with the fonts (type) in Berkshire Living across the board. For those font-heads out there, we changed everything that was in Penumbra to Cecilia, which includes the headers at the tops of the pages (Culture, LivingStyle, etc.) to the folios (page numbers, magazine issue date) at the bottom of the pages, as well as the text in “The Goods” boxes that accompany each story. Plus, we changed the look of the Table of Contents, Feedback (letters to the editor), contributor bios, and the SceneAround section, all to freshen things up and make the reading experience even better for you.

            I also want to take this opportunity of our fifth anniversary to say thank you. Thank you to all of our loyal and often rabid readers. Thank you to all of our committed and generous advertisers. Thank you to an incredible in-office staff of talented and fun writers, designers, and editors. Thank you to our extended family of writers, editors, designers, salespeople, production, and circulation staff, without whom this magazine would never reach your hands. And, thank you to my family and friends whose continued support and love make it easy and fun for me to come to work everyday.

            Here’s to the next five years and beyond…