At least two thumbs down. Your design has always reminded me of pop art, fraught with unnecessary visual noise, but at least it's been fun, and mostly worth squinting through.
I thought at first the strikingly more difficult readability in the new issue was the excessively wide and intense black bars that make the eyes' irises fight against them to dig the text out against the overbright, white page background. It does make the ads opposite pop, which I suspect could be the point, but, if so, y'all ought to hang your heads in greedy shame. However, if one can't read text, one is going to skip ads too.
Then I physically compared the part of the new issue that didn't have those ill-considered bars to The New Yorker, since your back pages were more difficult to read, too. 0 for 2 guys, since your more florid typeface choice is dramatically smaller, relative to the classic of readability. Not all your creative readers are kids, and our aging eyes do not appreciate this. Their page size is the same as your newly shrunken one.
Finally I got out one of your own older issues, and the combination of a wizened, more difficult typeface issue becomes one not just by comparison to a classic for conveying content. Trying to give us less gives us less, even when measured against your own past. Page size is not the problem; y'all are supposed to be creative designers. We can appreciate the saved trees.
But, your type needs a little blue pill or equivalent -- maybe take some strength/space for it from those black bars... Ya gotta make it bigger. There is no substitute.
Until proven otherwise, this design revision turns out neither as interesting nor as useful as what y'all have done before.
Still appreciate the content hidden behind/within it, though.
Terence Yorks, Ph.D.
