Inside My Table #94 | Excerpt
Editor’s Letter—Painting the Store
I hope you’ve noticed the new logo on the front cover and the cleaner, more muscular design in the pages of My Table. This has been a long time coming.
It began with an observation by Paula Murphy, our director of special projects, that because My Table is slightly oversized, we’re often placed behind other publications on the newsstand. And what could people see of us? Just the two risers from the “b” and “l” in our name. Paula suggested we reconfigure our logo so that “Houston’s Dining Magazine” was above the name. The tag line, we figured, would then be visible, even if the logo was not.
Fast-forward two years. This past summer I happened to meet designer Tom Newton, who agreed to help us craft a new logo. Bringing in an outsider turned out to be a very good idea, because he had no sentimental baggage about the old look. He wasn’t familiar with our early roots as a little homemade newsletter and the adorable logo that Canadian designer Joanna Wiebe originally created for us back in 1994 using Adobe’s Remedy typeface. Through a number of tweaks over the years, we always kept that cute little “e” with the halo of dots as a connection with our past.
Well, we’re finally ready to try something entirely new. I love this new logo, made from a font called Eagle. It reminds me of a 1920s Russian Constructivist poster. Inside the magazine, we’ve cleaned up things quite a bit. Our graphic designer Jen Cooper kept the Garamond body type and Futura headline type, but has used them in some creative new ways. We’ve consolidated Houston Bites Back, which is the front-of-the-book section that is filled with short stories and news.
So what do you think? My colleague Patricia Sharpe at Texas Monthly warned me to get ready for all the emails saying, “Oh, why did you change it? We loved it the old way.” But, she added, every so often, you have to repaint your store.
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SAVE THE DATE: We’re planning the first ever My Table Golf Tournament on Monday, June 7. Details to come. Get your dream teams together now!
