Opinion BY Armin

Men’s Journal Gets Manlier

First published in 1992, Men’s Journal, as its name implies is a lifestyle magazine for men with a circulation of more than 700,000 copies to an 84% male audience. Owned by Wenner Media, Men’s Journal is a sister publication to Rolling Stone and Us Weekly. Last week the magazine introduced a new logo designed by renown letterer Jim Parkinson — who previously drew one of the past versions of the logo — in collaboration with Men’s Journal art director Benjamen Purvis.

[They] took their inspiration from 1930s European auto-racing posters — rugged, elegant, unadorned. “It’s handcrafted, masculine, and authoritative,” Purvis says. “I think it perfectly expresses the spirit of our magazine.”
— “New Look” mention

The previous logo was good, falling in that red, graphically beveled look that Jim Parkinson has mastered over the years, most famously in his logo for sister publication Rolling Stone — although I don’t think Parkinson did the previous version, just the one before that. The new logo abandons the outlines, shadows, and dimensionality in favor of a bad-ass, bold, and condensed treatment. The combination of hard angles in the “S” and “R” coupled with the barely round corners gives the logo an extra masculine whiff that the previous logos lacked. The tracking and kerning is quite impeccable too and it looks great emblazoned across the width of the magazine’s cover.

Thanks to Tony Scida for the tip.