New Beginnings

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 3/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

Interior Design has a brand-new frock.With times a-changing, design's audience has increased exponentially. (Major smug for us.) This magazine's core mission, supporting designers and, yes, manufacturers via cogent and pristine reporting, began to seem no longer sufficient. Our readers have changed and, thank goodness, increased substantially over the seven years of my tenure. You're a tony lot, fairly fanatical about design. So, being the diligent hosts that we are, we delved far below our glossy surface to retool our content in a way that embraces you newcomers—a task that required a vast number of late nights.

We never could have done it without enlisting. . .all of you, our dear designer friends. You have always been the real protagonists of this magazine but, for some strange reason, we'd banished your bios to our back pages. From here on in, you'll be right up front under a glitzy “Headliners” banner. (Right after me, hee hee. I'll be introducing each issue from this comfy new perch at the very beginning.) Just a few pages away, you'll see that “Designwire” has expanded to take over all our news functions. The “Crosslines” Q&A and “Matters of Design” essay have also, finally, acquired more real estate for those of you who, like that legendary Playboy reader, buy us for our prose. With a new department, “Offsite,” we're inviting readers to share the most intimate part of their anatomy, their eye, when traveling round the globe. “Mover/Shaker” will report on design leaders and advocates in locations just as far-flung. Then we've added a little bit of magic with “Mixed Media,” where materials and technique come together as a perfect combo. And finally there's “Market,” a longtime favorite. We've conspicuously increased our coverage, not only with mega product but also with an in-depth look at process and profiles of individual talents.

Super-designers Lee Mindel and Ali Tayar and the Alpha Workshops's Kenneth Wampler are just a few of the many characters throughout this special issue. We've made a concerted and, we hope, tangible effort to get closer to them, because, in a nutshell, they represent our newest goal. In addition to showcasing the spatial solutions achieved by designers, we intend to focus much more closely on their identities as individuals. We are convinced that, as innovators, they provide models to be emulated and built upon, the latter metaphorically only, please.

Now, I'm going to catch some zzz's.